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Articles on compilations from other sources

The article FHM-US's 100 Sexiest Women 2005 has been stuck in a debate at Wikipedia:Copyright problems over whether or not it's a copyright violation. The article lists, in order, the 100 names that had been reported in FHM magazine as the results of an annual poll it conducts (here is the 2004 list to show what it looked like). Some people are arguing that FHM has the copyright on this list. Others (including myself) think that the list itself is not copyrightable because the magazine editors did not select and rank the results; they reported the results of a poll. The magazine also added editorial content by selecting pictures and text to accompany the list, but none of this was included in the Wikipedia article so it wasn't an issue.

The issue is still unresolved. Some people say it is a copyright violation and others disagree. Unfortunately the original discussion has died down with no agreement reached. So in order to seek a wider range of information and hopefully reach a consensus, I'd like to open a discussion here. MK2 15:21, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The list is certainly copyrightable, regardless of whether it is a poll or not. Since FHM conducted and compiled the poll, they own the copyright to the list. Reproducing the list on Wikipedia without permission would constitute a violation of FHM's copyright. Kaldari 01:44, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A counterexample that others have given are lists of Academy Award winning actors, Pulitzer Prize winners, or Nobel laureates. These are all lists of people that are basically copying the work of the organizations that gave out the awards. From a legal standpoint, what is the difference between FHM-US's 100 Sexiest Women 2004 and Academy Award for Best Actor? MK2 03:42, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
None of those other examples are analogous because none of those compiled a ranked list that was arranged in a particular order. That an individual has been given an award or honorific constitutes an isolated fact that cannot be copyrighted, and a list of such awards organized chronologically is no more creative than the alphabetical phone book in Feist v. Rural. What is copyrightable is the compilation of an ordered list of selected individuals. If FHM did the selecting and arranging in some meaningful way that was creative rather than purely functional, then it may be copyrightable as a whole, though not in isolated references to specific parts. How was this poll conducted and compiled? If it was conducted according to standard industry phone sampling, and the list was merely compiled from a numerical tally of those results, then it would likely fail the originality test. Postdlf 04:04, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Interesting point, but do you think the Oscars, Pulitzers, or Nobel Prizes are awarded based on phone sampling? FHM conducting a self-selected poll of its readers and awarding the highest vote getter the title "Sexiest Woman of 2005" is no different, from a copyright standpoint, than the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences conducting a self-selecting poll of its members and awarding the highest vote getter the title "Best Actor". MK2 06:27, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure why you're continuing to labor this point, because I had just said mere reporting of any standard phone survey results would not be copyrightable, without some creative editing or intervention in the process. But regardless, you need selection and arrangement to have a copyrightable compilation. Determining a winner just gets you a selection of one fact—who your winner is—but no arrangement, and independent facts can't be copyrighted, only original arrangements or expressions of facts. Conducting a poll to get a ranked list gets you selection and arrangement, so the question is then only whether there is some creative editing control over the end result, or some creative step added to the process that isn't merely functional. Postdlf 06:54, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think you and I are actually in agreement on this issue. In this particular case, FHM conducted a poll and printed the results - the 100 women who got the most votes ranked in order from the one who got the most votes to the one who got the 100th highest total. So there was essentially no editorial input at this point other than the decision to conduct the poll. Then the magazine added editorial content by selecting pictures and writing short text articles to accompany the results - I think everyone is in agreement that the picture selections and text are copyrightable. So as long as the Wikipedia article only list the names and their ranking it's okay. MK2 02:33, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Yes, we are in agreement on that, if the poll was conducted in that manner. Postdlf 05:16, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Simply compiling the information is not enough. There has to be some element of originality in the selection and arrangement (see Feist v. Rural). I'd have to know more about how the poll was conducted to really state a conclusion, but it's at best an issue on the outer edge of copyrightability. I have been unable to find a single court case that has involved an infringement claim based on survey results, btw. Postdlf 02:16, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It would be great if instead of having just the lists (which don't really add much; a user interested in this list may as well go to the FHM website and get the pictures too) we have some analysis of the FHM-US lists as they have existed for the past 5 years. Who has appeared every year? Who has highest average position? Some commentary on how the lists were created. Not sure if this would make the copyright problem go away, but it would be more interesting content. Pcb21| Pete 08:21, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You may want to read below. Providing factual comparisions might skate the line with original research, but may very well meet the needs of Feist v. Rural.--ghost 04:09, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Re original research: The "no original research" policy always used to be about preventing crackpot physics theories turning up as fact on Wikipedia and the recent extension of its intent is harmful. In practice we have to be able to do a modicum of synthesis else everything will be copied from elsewhere. Pcb21| Pete 08:34, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

We appear to have reached another deadlock. Based on the comments posted here and at the original discussion, this is what we have (with my paraphrasing of people's opinions)

Believe the list is protected by copyright:

  • RickK
  • Korath - FHM selected the people on the list and made the order
  • Physchim62 - FHM had creative input into the list
  • Kaldari - copyrightable because FHM conducted the poll

Believe the list is not protected by copyright:

  • MK2
  • Quadell - is not certain
  • Burgundavia - doesn't think a simple list can be copyrighted
  • Postdlf - not copyrightable unless FHM added creative input to the results of the poll

Other

  • Pcb21|Pete - suggesting adding new editorial content
  • ghost - commented on original research policy

MK2 18:09, 6 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You can't vote on what the law is! It's like voting on whether gravity keeps us on the planet - a majority vote against it won't make us all float away. Leave it to the experts (in this case, Postdlf). See also Kregos v. Associated Press, 937 F.2d 700 (2d Cir. 1991), holding that a particular selection of factors to gauge the performance of pitchers could not be copyrighted, nor could a mere arrangement of such factors, but a particular arrangement of those specific factors could (e.g. not "A" alone, nor "B" alone, but "A+B" together). Here, we are not copying the arrangement, just the results of applying the particular selection of factors. -- BDAbramson talk 23:17, 2005 May 18 (UTC)

It seems to me it's hard to argue it either way. See U.S. Copyright Office - Copyright Basics: What Is Not Protected by Copyright? -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:05, 21 May 2005 (UTC) [reply]

  • Having read the comments here so far, it seems to me the list alone is not copyrightable. Here is another way to think about it: Some organizers had a sort of a contest. The results were made known, along with a a lot of interesting detail concerning the contestants and the contest itself. Later, a second party posted the rankings of the contestants. Did the second party violate the first party's rights in any way?
  1. MLB Baseball season rankings Newspaper
  2. FHM Sexiest women rankings Wikipedia
ExampleOrganizersContestMethod2nd Party
1Major League BaseballBaseball team standingsPlayed a bunch of gamesNewspaper Sports page
2FHMSexiest women rankingsAsked a bunch of peopleWikipedia
Why is example 2 any different than example 1?
However, that the New York Times disagrees with me. They have pursued action against other publications that have re-published their best-seller list. For example, they went after www.amazon.com [1] for using the New York Times bestseller list as a basis for providing purchase incentives (books on the lsit were to be discounted). This was quickly settled [2] with Amazon agreeing to certain terms, including; listing the books alphabetically instead of in-order, and sharing sales information with the New York Times. Since this didn't make it to a legal ruling, it does not set a legal precedent. Maybe someone can find an example that did go to court? Johntex 02:11, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Here's one that might be related. The Court Service-Chancery Division-judgment But I'm no lawyer and it's a UK issue. It's William Hill bookmakers against the jockey club and the British Horseracing Board over the use of fixtures, racecards and other data held in the form of a database. I think it's relevant because FHM's information is quite possibly held in a database. However, I don't know whether the publication of the material in FHM negates database extraction. Do newspapers print the whole list, or do they just mention who's top? Steve block 19:52, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK, I'll bite. Example 1 contains facts which can be verified independent of any newspaper or press service publication (I do not believe MLB can claim ownership of such rankings as they are simply objective facts that can be obtained through a variety of sources). Such rankings are simply a compilation of publicly accessible information. The information in example 2 was collected by a proprietary method. There is no way to independently determine what the contents of that list is except as that information is released by the publication. older≠wiser 02:22, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)
But don't forget example 3 - Feist v. Rural. Company A goes out and collects all the information (name, phone #, address) of everyone in the town, then publishes it in a phone book; company B skips the expense and copies company A's list of names and numbers, arranging them alphabetically (of course, because it's a phone book). The organizer here is company A; the "contest" was getting all the info from the town residents; the method was going door to door and checking who lived where and had what number; and the secondary user was company B. If FHM is just sampling opinions (like Company A gathering info from residents), is that info "authored" by FHM? -- BDAbramson talk 06:51, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)
For what it's worth, here's how the poll is conducted. FHM announces the existence of the poll in its magazine and on its website. Anyone who wishs to vote can submit up to ten women for inclusion on the list by mail or email. There is no pre-generated list of nominees. FHM does not specifically solicit opinions and does not contact any individuals for their opinions. There is no prohibition against submitting multiple votes. At a certain point, FHM stops the voting and counts up how many votes each woman got. The women are ranked from 1 to 100 based on how many votes they received. FHM publishs the results along with pictures and text. The results (but not the pictures or text) are also released by FHM to the media for promotional purposes. MK2 04:59, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Signature limit

I've seen some signatures starting to get rather large nowadays, using different colours for each letter of their username, for example. I saw one that took up four lines in the edit box (non-maximised window, admittedly). Should we force a signature length limit? 64 characters, for example, should be enough for most cases. violet/riga (t) 19:47, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you (somewhat ironically, as I have a feeling I may have been the above-mentioned user). My signature is now siginificantly cut down, and I really think that some users (Merovingian and Starblind come to mind) obstruct the editing process unnecessarily. I don't know how easy this would be. I certainly think there should also be a policy against using templates as signatures. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 20:03, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It was actually Merovingian on this occasion. violet/riga (t) 20:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it certainly could have been me. ;) Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 20:19, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yikes, I just counted. Merovingian has a 412 character sig. Of course, mine's kind of bloated, too--it's a solid 137 characters. Smoddy's comes in at 61 characters, and Violetriga's is a svelte 60. I consider myself somewhat hampered by my longer user name, however. :) Thryduulf has a point about the attention-grabbing large fonts used by a particular editor.... --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 22:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Mine was 327 characters. Oops. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 22:17, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I fully support this, although the signature thats annoying me at the moment is Sam Spade's and accordingly I'd add a note against using text significantly larger than normal. Thryduulf 20:47, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Is there something wrong with large signatures? --User:Carnildo/sandbox
Yes. :) --TenOfAllTrades 22:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC) [reply]
LOL! —Wahoofive (talk) 23:50, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There has to be a limit. I proposed it before. It is evil to include images and overly complex layout. When you sign your name on paper, you do it as effortlessly as possible. You do not write a 10,000-word autobiography with a 150-foot tall oil painting of your face as your signature. If you don't do it with your hands in the real world, don't do it here. -- Toytoy 12:56, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

I'd be reluctant to proscribe a precise character limit, but yes, sigs that take more than a couple lines in the edit window I would agree are execessive, and should be avoided. I also agree that any enlargement (or emboldment, etc.) of the sig that implies it is more important than the surrounding text is in extremely poor taste, and should be avoided. Niteowlneils 17:13, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would rather not have an absolute character limit. I especially think that 64 characters is too few. Those of us with longer user names (and I don't think that "Knowledge Seeker" is excessively long) would have difficulty squeezing if we want a link to our talk page. For instance, were I to use violet/riga's signature, but substitute my name, it bumps up the character limit to 80 or so. Even the generic [[User:Knowledge Seeker|Knowledge Seeker]] [[User talk:Knowledge Seeker|*]] ("Knowledge Seeker *"), which is the simplest signature I can think of that links to my talk page, uses 76 characters. I wouldn't mind a general recommendation about signature length (if a character count is specified, though, it has to be higher) and to limit excessive HTML markup. I use a single Unicode character in mine which I think it quite reasonable. I support a rule against using images and templates. I do think that using larger text for your signature is in extremely poor taste, although I don't know if I'd want a rule to say not to use it. Bold text is in rather poor taste too, I feel, unless it is to separate parts of your signature, like for user name and talk, especially if you are trying to avoid lengthy HTML markup. — Knowledge Seeker দ 17:57, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You are right, 64 is too little. One line in a standard edit box on 1024x768 is 100 characters. How about 150 or something (for the technophiles, 128 would do, I guess) and a ban on enlarging, on images, and on templates? Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 18:04, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Just because Wikipedia's servers seem to be severely strained these days, I'd suggest at least a temporary moratorium on images in signatures. Transclusion is also probably a bad idea for the same reason, though I admit it improves readability of the wiki markup. Should we have a semi-policy on this stuff? (Or do we already...?) --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 18:01, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I hesitated a long time before adding that talk page link to my signature... Somehow it disturbs the peaceful essence of my three-letter name. Of course, I care little about signature length. >:-) Incidentally, Knowledge Seeker, the signature "[[User:Knowledge Seeker|]] · [[User talk:Knowledge Seeker|Talk]]" is exactly 64 characters... I'm assuming the raw signature field only counts characters, not substituted markup. JRM · Talk 18:19, 2005 May 10 (UTC)

You're correct, JRM. But that would expand to the full 76-character sig once I used it, right? So there'd really be no difference, unless I was using it to get by a software limit in the signature field. Let me see what happens to it: Knowledge Seeker · Talk. — Knowledge Seeker দ 18:53, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the longer version is what appears in the edit window now. — Knowledge Seeker দ 18:55, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, of course. I would assume the limit imposed was done in the signature field, because that's by far easiest to implement. Running the thing through the markup canonicalizer to count the result is more involved. (I'm making this name up, I don't know what the developers call it—anyway, it's the stage between submitting and database.) It depends on what sort of "limit" we're talking here—the generated HTML from even that simple signature above is a whopping 365 characters. Of course, if a field length limit were imposed, transclusion would have to be forbidden, otherwise there would be no point. OTOH, methods that go measure the generated HTML are a bit wobbly too, as this may easily vary. You'd have to implement something that checks the signature length every time you write it (just in case I change some transcluded template somewhere) and that's too much work. And honestly, what's the point? I can always substitute a template and add five twiddles behind it. Use peer pressure to discourage the really over-the-top signatures, but there's probably no point in trying to get the software to curb the madness reliably. The home page of the greatest man on earth! · He don't need no steenkin' signatures, ask him why not! 19:50, 2005 May 10 (UTC)
My sig is actually:
violet/riga]] [[User_talk:violetriga|(t)
You don't need to count the rest of the markup, and that therefore makes it a tiny 40 characters. violet/riga (t) 16:50, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
So, because you chose to have a small signature you feel you have the right to impose yourself on others? Everyone would be limited to exactly the style signature you have? How untolerantly religious of you (Wikipedia really is a religion, isn't it?) - Tεxτurε 20:15, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to see an anthropological analysis of these signatures. I'm not an anthropologist, but I'll make my observations anyway... My guess is that since the signature is about the only image we show to each other, it has become a form of plumage. I'll wager that most fancy signatures belong to young, males on the make. Also, the signatures send a message that the user is very technologically savvy. Most users don't know how to make those fancy sigs, so the message that they send is, "Don't mess with me, I'm smart, and I've been around here a long time, so you better not revert what I write!". Now, I don't think we should encourage either message, so I think we should limit signatures to ~~~~ . I'm serious! -- Samuel Wantman 07:56, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. Wikipedians are not male peacocks. -- Toytoy 08:33, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
The breakdown of Wikipedian Community is directly related to the inability of the human mind to manage large numbers of reputations informally. While nothing can completely evade the m:Rule of 150, colorful signatures help delay the crisis. A sig does indeed reveal a little something about member personality; more important, it provides a mnemonic handle for readers to grab onto. Other forums have avatars to aid in informal reputation management; we have customized sigs.
I oppose any hard-and-fast rule limiting what one may put into one's sig. Members with absurd and offensive sigs self-identify as dicks; and this is very helpful to the rest of us.
Or, for example, take my sig -- (please!) — Xiong熊talk*. It links to four distinct pages: User:Xiong, Special:Emailuser/Xiong, User talk:Xiong, and User:Xiong/Metatalk -- all of which I hope may be actually useful to some readers. Additionally, it answers the perennial question: "What does Xiong mean?" and declares my pseudo-Chinese identity and my otherwise somewhat boring conventional methods. This is a resource for readers who may not be inclined to spend the time to go looking elsewhere -- and, best of all, ultra-ascetics who think it is too elaborate can label me as a self-indulgent old fool and move on.
(That said, templates and images in sigs really do identify users, and not in a good way.) -- User:11001001 08:42, 2005 May 11 (UTC)
Most Wikipedia talk pages are participated by less than 150. Even in a group of inter-related pages (astronomy, modern European history, Star Wars universe, mammals, policy ...), active and frequent contributors seldom exceed this number (my well-educated guess).
If you visit w:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, you may find many if not most top 20 or 50 contributors are those whom you don't know about. Why? Because they do not contribute to your part of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a big bowl of primordial soup of one hundred zillion faceless unicellular organisms. Wikipedia is composed of hundreds of small bays each populated with as many as dozens of species. Fancy signatures, in my opinion, are usually not needed.
I know a talk page created by three could be visited by each man, woman or dog in China. But if you do not participate, the other billion people do not need to know about you anyway. If a discussion is participated by 20, you only need to know these 20 names. In my opinion, the only important part of my speech is the content. We shall not encourage people to judge the quality of a message based on the poster's identity. Reputation is somewhat useful in other Internet forums, but it is not the most important thing here in Wikipedia.
Most customized signature are:
  • poorly designed (without a standardized and intuitive interface);
  • annoying to most uninterested readers;
  • making the page difficult to work with.
I don't think signatures are really needed. You don't need a vanity plate to drive your car on the highways. If vanity plates are free (as in "free beer"), every driver on earth will ask for one. Since they are not free, few people bother to own one. How many of you are going to pay $5 a month for your beautiful and useful signatures? -- Toytoy 15:11, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
Xiong's argument brings up another point. I would never have known that your sig linked to four different places if you hadn't said so (and I've seen your sig many times). Why do you need all those links? Has anyone ever emailed you? (No one's ever emailed me from WP.) Why would anyone even know you have a "Metatalk" page (whatever that is)? Even the many users who have "Talk" pages in their sigs (including me), I'm starting to think is kind of useless. It saves somebody ONE click if they want to post to your talk page. Is that worth it? Same with contributions list; ONE click. Whereas it's cluttering up talk pages in hundreds of places. Since the practical benefit of custom sigs is pretty much nil, and they're only for vanity, some limits would be reasonable. —Wahoofive (talk) 15:47, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Most of us has at least a telephone with at least a speedy dial button. I guess most of you had already known my home phone number (555-1234, if you forget my number). Now, I urge you to enter my number into your telephone so you can dial my number in 1 second rather than in 5 seconds.
I don't think many of you have that unstoppable impulse to give me one call. Even if I advertise my toll-free telephone number during a football game, I will hardly get a phone call. That's why I am confortable with my unattractive signature. -- Toytoy 17:02, May 11, 2005 (UTC)
It saves only one click, yes, but it also saves a rather lengthy page load. Wikipedia usually runs slow for logged-in users. --Carnildo 19:07, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • In light of the above, I've knocked my signature down from 309 characters to 235... Guess I'll see if I can trim it some more. -- BDAbramson thimk 20:02, 2005 May 17 (UTC)
    • Gave up my thimk to get it down to 153, which is not unreasonable, I think. -- BDAbramson talk 20:13, 2005 May 17 (UTC)

I think we should all endeavor to be more like ! :) --Dmcdevit 01:09, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • I believe:
  1. Fancy signatures do not serve much (if any) practical benefit. Even m:Rule of 150 (cited above as a proof of a benefit to fancy sigs) says that avatars and the like do not significantly forestall the "150 effect".
  2. Any curtailing of signatures should be based on practical reasons rather than aesthetic.
  3. I am not personally convinced these signatures are causing a problem - but if it can be shown they are slowing down page loads, or putting strain on the servers, or some other tangible problem, then we should absolutely impose a limit.
  4. If a limit is ever imposed, it should be well-defined (E.g. "100 characters limit" or "no pictures allowed" or "no HTML allowed" or whatever.) and not fuzzy (E.g. "Try to limit your signature length).
  5. If a limit is ever imposed, it should only be set after considering people with long names, non-English character names, etc.
  6. I am sympathetic to the desire to have a link directly to the User's talk page in his/her signature file. It is very handy for the person following the link not to have to go to the User's page before jumping to their Talk page. As long as we are talking about futures, why not change the standard signature to automatically include such a link, formattated in a standard way? E.g. : User:T This way, everyone would know what clicking on the T would do for them.
  7. As long as I am talking about changing the way things work - why not change the software to automatically put signatures on Talk & Discussion pages rather the user having to consciously type the four ~? That would save a lot of accidently unsigned posts. Johntex 21:42, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Well said, Johntex. I also agree with whoever said that big, ugly sigs are useful to identify the idiots among us; like rolex watches, they let others know who is vain enough to want a big ugly sig, and this is useful. I think the best choice is semi-public shaming, i.e. when you are irritated or inconvienced by a user's sig, leave them a small, simple message of complaint on their talk page. After they get enough, they will either leave Wikipedia in a huff, or fix their sig. Either alternative is probably OK. As an archiver of the Pump, I value being able to easily identify the date stamps on sigs, so a multi-line sig could be irritating. Just some thoughts. JesseW 08:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

OK, everyone knows I hate lengthy signatures. Now how about this proposal:

  • ~~~: [[User:Son of Sam|Son of Sam]]
  • ~~~~: [[User:Son of Sam|Son of Sam]] + time stamp
  • ~~~~~: [[User:Son of Sam|Son of Sam]] [[User talk:Son of Sam|Talk]] + time stamp

I also propose these non-official peer-pressure limitations:

  • No template.
  • No HTML tags.
  • No images.
  • No external links.
  • No more than 3 links.

I have seen signatures that contain two or more images. These signatures shall not be running wild. We shall encourage simplicity here. -- Toytoy 11:36, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

I haven't really had a problem with signatures being annoying; perhaps the peacocks on here have stayed away from the Roman Catholic corner. Nonetheless, I agree with the idea of an automatic signature (to avoid having to use ~~~~ ) as well as automatically adding the link to the user's talk page in the signature. I for one hate having to go to the user page first, particularly for those people I message frequently. As it relates to the other suggestions, I support anything that makes Wikipedia run faster, relieves strain on the servers, and limits the amount of wikistress and wikiwarfare that takes place. Essjay (talk) 08:56, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Reviews?

I'm not sure if there's a policy on this, and before bringing it up with the user in question, I wanted to ask. An anon (contribs) added a few video game reviews to pages. I reverted one I saw because I didn't think we should link to reviews unless absolutely mindblowingly special, and even then I'm not sure. If we link to one, should we link to a dissenting opinion? How about 3 of each type? Eight? Twenty? Why should one or only two reviews get top billing? He says we have FAQs and comics, but FAQs are objective (and frankly I wouldn't question removing that either) and the comic is just that, a piece of art inspired by the game, not a review of it. (Well, some of PA's comics are reviewish, but not this one). I would think we wouldn't want to endorse any specific review. Am I right or wrong? --Golbez 07:16, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

A review of a game, by the mere nature of it, is POV. It would be immensively difficult to present a NPOV review of a game, since a person's preferences of a like or dislike of the game is the point of view that one is attempting to establish about the game. However... it may be useful to include two very well known gaming magazine reviews which have almost polar opposites of what they think of the game. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:30, 21 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Golbez is talking about linking to reviews, not writing them, so the POVness or otherwise of the reviews doesn't really matter. Having said that, the linked-to reviews should be representative of the general consensus about the game.
As for whether to link for one or two instead of eight or twenty, I doubt whether lots of reviews add much to the article, just link to the best ones. Pcb21| Pete 10:33, 21 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, sorry, I wrote that way too late, he was LINKING reviews, not WRITING them. And Pete, okay, define "best review". One that agrees with you? Should someone else then come in and change that to one that agrees with them? Add another? That's a can of worms, man. The best solution seemed to be linking to Gamerankings.com, which someone did. --Golbez 17:41, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
Sorry. Linking them is fine... but I think we should be linking to highly well known sites or magazines with very high Alexa rankings. -- AllyUnion (talk) 00:27, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Suggestion: instead of linking to a small number of "prominent" reviews (the meaning of which is debatable), we could instead link to GameRankings.com, which features dozens of reviews for each game. It only includes reviews from sites that meet certain requirements (e.g. the site must produce at least 15 reviews per month, and has 100-300 archived reviews based on content). This has already been done for Katamari Damacy --Poiuyt Man talk 16:12, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How to use talk if almost all passages of an article are disputed?

Currently I have trouble with a guy who sticks to his own discussion style (see Talk:Tsushima Island). I think my effort for reconciliation was in vain, and I ask for help here: How to use talk in the case that almost all passages of an article are disputed?

That guy treats talk as sequential memory. He always adds his comments to the bottom of talk and expects others to do so. He behaves as if he was privileged to ignore other users' comments that has been placed elsewhere. I think this method works only if there is few issues. We can only discuss a limited number of problems at once; otherwise we will miss our points. And all-in-one reply is the besy way to dodge unfavorable questions.

My discussion method is to create sections per problem and to make point-by-point discussions. This means that we add comments to the bottom of each section instead of that of the whole page. I think the one-to-one mapping enables us to treat multiple problems simultaneously without missing our points. That guy complained about difficulty in finding comments in the large page. So I put quick references to ongoing discussions at the bottom of talk. But he ignored them (without any comment) and archived discussions in progress. I have no way to cooperate with him anymore. So I call for your help. --Nanshu 05:29, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As the "guy" involved, I should try to reply I suppose.
  1. Editing is a collaborative process; making large-scale edits on an article, with many different and substantial changes in different parts all at once, makes life very difficult for other editors. They might agree with some of the edits and not with others, but what in effect you're saying to them is: "Accept it all or remove it all." It shouldn't be too surprising if they remove it all. If edits are made gradually, one at a time, then other editors can discuss them one at a time, and the process becomes more collaborative and a lot more affable.
    NO NO NO, that's what diffs are for. Don't edit in steps! It clutters the article history, and gives lead to edit conflicts. Goodness knows we all sometimes edit in increments because we forget to use preview, but like, use preview, edit as much as you can in one go. Solve any edit conflicts *once*. Kim Bruning
    Perhaps I didn't make myself clear (though reading what I wrote here and below, I can't see any unclarity). Nanshu did exactly what you're complaining about, in fact (a string of edits rather than one big one). I'm not asking for a string of edits in quick succession (how would that solve my problem?); I'm saying that, when there are a lot of controversial edits, it's more considerate to other editors to introduce them gradually, discussing each one. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Your position is a shade of grey. Hmm, I'm still not entirely sure if I agree, but that's ok, I suppose. As long as you don't actually revert someone with different ideas about courtesy, that's fine! Kim Bruning
  2. When the edits are made all at once, it makes matters worse that the arguments for them are scattered through the Talk page, perhaps sometimes in archived sections, and editors are told: "It's all there somewhere — go and find it for yourselves."
    One word: diff. Might be nice to have pointers to where you've been responding at the bottom of the page if you feel people might get confused though. Kim Bruning
    One word: "courtesy". I'm not talking about policy or rules or whtever, I'm talking about simple, everyday, consideration for other editors. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    I think it should be safe to assume that people know how to use diffs. Especially admins :-) Kim Bruning
    But that's not the point. If a student reads an essay, and I ask where a quotation came from, i don't expect to be tossed a book and told to use the index. Of course I can use the index, but it's courteous to give the reference. It's the same here; of course other editors can track down earlier conversations using the diffs, but it's more courteous to explain again (especially as diffs rarely give the full picture, being limited to a snapshot of what can often be a long debate). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 17:41, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm a little confused here. The original query seemed to be about where on the talk page an editor would place explanations of article edits, but many of the responses seem to address the article edits themselves. For the talk page, I have three words: table of contents. I agree with Nanshu that a sprawling discussion is more manageable if it's segmented into different topic headings. It's true that, as a result, one edit to the article might be explained in several different sections of the talk page, but that makes it much easier to follow a particular issue. JamesMLane 05:38, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  3. In this particular case, I archived the Talk page because it was very large and unwieldy, and archiving is the recommended action. I didn't ignore the references, but too many of them were in fact not explanatory at all, and the problem still lay in all the edits being done in a lump, making it very difficult to disentangle those that were justified from those that weren't.
    Don't archive ongoing discussions. If you're not sure, don't archive. Kim Bruning
    I was sure; I'm just not infallible. I hadn't noticed that a recent comment had been added to an old discussion. Once it had been pointed out, I apologised. It's always possible for the live discussion to be retrieved, though, rather than an issue made of the mistake. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Roger that! Kim Bruning
  4. The problem rose from the fact that Nanshu had had problems with another editor over a period of time, and had a backlog of edits that he'd wanted to make, but had been unable to. When I cam along, with a couple of others, and weighed in against the rogue editor, Nanshu saw his chance to make all his backlog of edits at once. It doesn't work like that, as I've explained above. This page isn't in fact his last option; he could come back to the article and make the edits one at a time, spaced out, giving other editors a chance to assess and discuss each one. Much of what he wants to do will be done, and the article will doubtless be improved by the process. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:45, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    "That might be your way, but that's not the wiki way, editor!" (see above) Kim Bruning 11:02, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    There isn't one "wiki way" — much depends upon context. On a page that's been racked by controversy, and when the edits have themselves all been controversial, my suggestion still seems to me to be at least sensible. Do you have any real objection, or helpful suggestions, rather than just slogans? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Reply to people point-by-point where they make their statements, make all the edits you want to make all at once, use preview, make thorough use of history and diffs to discover what's going on and who's editing what and who's talking to who (and especially to find folks talking to you ;-) ). Kim Bruning 14:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Mr Tan for background on this supporter. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    I had to clean up after him too. ^^;; Kim Bruning 14:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    A third point of view on someone making lots of edits all at once. Being BOLD in making lots of edits all at once is not being disrespectful to others, it is simply one way of doing it. Reverting the edits and saying hey guy add them one at a time as some are ok and others we need to discuss is EQUALLY BOLD and equally not disrespectful to others. Each from his point of view sees the other as making things "harder for them". tough. having other people with other goals and opinions DOES make things harder, but that's the process. No one has the right to demand everyone else do it their way. 4.250.168.145 18:26, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You can see in his attitude about the RfC.This is a place not meant for advertisements. This is however, personal attack, and violating the proper usage of a particular discussion/project page (discussion/project pages should be used for discussions of that particular topic. I wonder how is this related to Nanshu's arguement.

Tan 22:12, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've sorted out one dispute between User:Nanshu and User:Mel Etitis before (concerning Nanyang). Their attitude towards each other stems in part from the former's desire to be heard and have his edits left untouched and from the latter's "stubbornness" in refusing to answer the former's points and in reverting the former's edits. He does this, however, based on Wikipedia policies which he presumes other people know of. Nanshu does not know of them (sometimes), however, and is only trying to save his own reputation in the easiest and most effective way possible: pinning the blame on the other editor. In this way they have managed to collaborate very unproductively and have produced numerous reverts so far. In the previous dispute, I eventually managed to find a compromise, a combination of the wishes of the two editors, though I must say that both of them (initially) refused to find and adopt a golden mean. As for Tan, I do not think his words can be trusted as he is growing increasingly paranoid with each passing day, with his refusal to accept that his grammar is of a level below that of other editors. JMBell° 15:27, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't discuess such a thing here. But I have to correct your mistake. You confused me with someone else, possibly Huaiwei. --Nanshu 00:27, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Did not accept my own mistakes? What a mysterious reply. I have acknoledged that my English is sometimes poor, as evidenced in the Talk:Nakhi. However, the problem lies wit all of you is that you all are not very coperative, and sometimes hostile, especially in the case of Mel. If you all can be more polite and do not make life difficult for people, naturally I will be in a very pleasant mood, which will improve my ability to type better english (I do make revisions of my own written pages and copyedited my written pages, however.)

Tan 23:40, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, he did accept his mistakes. However, he will not let another editor judge or edit his work (which consists of the most appalling form of English grammar known to Man). He has thrown all our observations back at us in the form of vehement accusations. I really think he's getting to be paranoid. Or manipulative. JMBell° 16:07, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What's the issue here? I didn't think that the "English grammar" of Mr Tan was part of it; but if people here correct me and say that it is, I can say something about it. -- Hoary 03:04, 2005 May 23 (UTC)
It isn't really relevant, but Mr Tan's problem is largely that he insists on correcting (and criticising) other people's English, despite (as his comments here amply demonstrate) being in no position to do so. His grievances then spill into discussions like this, and people respond to him. It's a diversion, and would be better ignored. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:48, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I just cannot make sense what are you trying to utter about. Not letting another editor edit my work? There is nothing in wikipedia that should be called as "my work". Wikipedia is a free and open content area.

I think that Mel, and to some extent, you, is vehement. You have either shown strange and funny behaviour in your edits (I will state it in my RfC response tommorow or the day after).

Tan 14:42, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Your usage of the word "vehement" implies that you do not know what it means. Anyway, do not advertise your own mistakes here. As you just said, talk pages are not places for advertisements. May I instead refer you to your RfC or your own user and talk pages. JMBell° 13:31, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Mel advised: It's a diversion, and would be better ignored. Well said. But so far as Mr Tan's grammar is an issue for you here, may I point out that his work (which consists of the most appalling form of English grammar known to Man) is (if one attempts to take it seriously) plain wrong, and that such remarks are insulting and unhelpful. -- Hoary 14:08, 2005 May 23 (UTC)
I believe there is a lot of explaining to be done. May we discuss this in a private talk page.... JMBell° 16:31, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]


Come to User Talk:Mr Tan for my reply and debate from there--the debate is getting too out of the main topic itself.

Tan 19:51, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]


I thank Kim Bruning and JamesMLane for their positive response to my opinion. And I ask Mel Etitis to keep in mind the reason why I posted my opinion to Village pump and put such a general title. I think that to edit Wikipedia is to fill a blank paper. The current wiki format is suitable for encyclopaedia articles but not for discussion (and dictionary entries). I hope we develop guidelines for large-scale discussion.

Mel Etitis didn't clarify his opinion, but I guess he will stick to his own way. As I said above, one of the problems of his way is that we can only discuss a limited number of problems at once. That's why he complained, "[W]hen there are a lot of controversial edits, it's more considerate to other editors to introduce them gradually, discussing each one." He wants to keep everything in control and asks everyone to discuss at his pace. But we don't have to join discussion immediately because we can edit Wikipedia any time. So my discussion way solves the problem.

I agree with JamesMLane that there are some issues not suitable for segmentation. For example, I will put in question whether it is ok to use unverifiable sources that do not cite primary sources, and whether one can discuss a topic one doesn't know. Of course, I will not splawl such general issues into several different sections. --Nanshu 00:27, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Timetables and addresses

I've been concerned with a couple of articles (though there may be others) which consist of little more than stubs about bus companies, plus extensive details of bus-routes (see Trent Barton and Stagecoach in Chesterfield). One of them also included the address, 'phone number, and fax number of the company. Neither the lists of routes nor the contact details seem encyclopædic to me (aside from being of very local interest at best, they're ephemeral), but I can't find anything in policy either way. I'd prefer a link to the on-line timetables of the companies involved. Any views? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:01, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete the windy descriptions of bus routes; wikipedia is not a bus guide.

Tan 22:21, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Not quite sure. Wpedia should give information about these buses. Are bus routes considered relevant information? JMBell° 14:40, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bus-route details are probably the most important pieces of information about a bus company, so it is essential to include them in an article about a bus company. Ted Ted 14:56, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think that degree of specificity is far too detailed for Wikipedia. Someone started a similar exercise with Arriva by putting one route on the page. After several months without expansion, I took it off - Arriva has thousands of bus routes in many countries, and there's no way we're likely to have an encyclopaedically complete list. -- Arwel 17:28, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Ted Ted's right in one sense, of course; the routes (and timetables, and fare structures) are most important to potential users — but not to potential shareholders, for example. Different sorts of information are relevant to different sources. I get a timetable for the routes, etc., and I look in a reference work for information about the company's history, what's interesting about it, etc. I'm still not convinced (and Arwel makes a good point too), but for once I agree with Mr Tan (except for the bit about windiness). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 17:46, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • There is no way timetables should be in wikipedia, they change too often for one thing. I don't see a problem with having a link to the online timetable fot that particular bus company. David D. 18:22, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I've just discovered that both articles are at least partial copyvios. Could those involved in editing them proceed in an orderly fashion to the relevant Talk pages (let the passengers off first, please)? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 18:27, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Featured Article Removal Candidate

I would like to propose a new policy before nominating an article as a FARC. I've noticed that there is a certain person who likes to nominate a particular category of articles for demotion. I want to illustrate the ridiculous ease that anybody can pull down a featured article, notwithstanding the hours put in to feature it. Here's what I propose:

  1. Mention, on the talk page of the article, which all FA criteria the page lacks, or if the text is a gross POV.
  2. A time period of a minimum of seven days should be given so that those who handle/watch the page can respond to the reviewer's comments.
  3. A mention that if comments are not satisfactorily entertained, the page may be nominated as a FARC in a week's time.
  4. Only objective points, which can be taken care of should be raised. Subjective statements such as "I feel that its not brilliant prose".
  5. If his/her grouses are still unaddressed, only then may the reviewer move to the FARC. He also has to cite why this does not deserve to be a FA, and how his queries were not dealt with.

I say this because I've spent hours trying to get articles up to FA standards. Seeing some of my articles pulled down on ludicrous and whimsical grounds is really annoying, especially since the contents of a page change over a period of time and may not reflect the matter when it was nominated.  =Nichalp (Talk)= 18:23, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

I think your suggestion has merit. I believe that the original nominator should be notified first and be given the chance to revise the FA article before its denomination unless it can be proven that the article is really bad. The short comments that I see on the FA Removal Candidates is distrubing. The process of FARC should have as an equal amount of complaints as it would for FA status. If something is nominated as a removal candidate, it should highlight all the points that illustrate why the article is no longer a FA candidate. Not something as short as: "I think this article falls quite a way short of current Featured quality. There's lots of problems obviously evident and not all can be easily fixed — I can give examples if you like, but I think it's clear, and I'm feeling lazy ;-)"; I think that's a bit unacceptable, given how much work and argument is required for an article to be an FA. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:32, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of merit here, I think. I share AllyUnion's concerns regarding the low level of argument on FARC; it is currently far too easy to nominate an article that people have put a lot of work into at some point to get it to FA standard in the first place with nothing more than a snide sideswipe. As with FAC, only actionable objections should be held valid. On occasion, the only action that really needs to be taken is to revert to the version that was made an FA in the first place. Filiocht | Blarneyman 08:38, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
I have an issue with the idea of this kind of "undo" votes as well. If a community decides an article should be featured, they have chosen it as an exemplary work. If then a vote is offered for FARC, that is voting on whether the article is no longer of high quality. An article can only degrade independently like this if it becomes out of date due to lack of edits. In any other case, it is due to edits that either allegedly or actually worsen the article. However, these edits do not constitute a legitamate reason for FARC nomination. If they are entirely harmful in nature they should be reverted to the status at featured acceptance. That removes the need for FARC nom. In most cases, though, the edits will have good aspects that should be merged in. Therefore, in most instances, there is no reason for FARC. It is simply a revote do to dissatisfaction with the earlier outcome. Superm401 | Talk 03:08, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
I think we need a page where featured articles can be reviewed. As you say, it is possible for featured articles to become out of date, or to degrade in quality due to edits after being featured. The featured article criteria also change, generally becoming more stringent (although new requirements are seldom applied immediately to old articles: references have been required for months, and there are still plenty of unreferenced or poorly referenced featured articles; more recently, many people have come to expect "appropriate" inline references).
What should not happen is that a new featured article is nominated within days or weeks after it is promoted, which happens from time to time. But if you are concerned with the process, vote at WP:FARC. -- ALoan (Talk) 10:51, 26 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Major to minor

More and more editors seem to have "minor" set as the default, which results in all sorts of major edits slipping in as minor (I've just seen a VfD nomination marked as minor, as well as a number of VfD votes, substantial changes to articles, etc.). I suppose that there are people who make nothing by minor edits, and for whom this default possibility is useful, but is there any way to discourage its use more generally? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:26, 22 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is always the possibility of banning the offending user. RickK 23:57, May 22, 2005 (UTC) Created by now-hard-banned vandal masquerading as me. RickK 04:33, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
This isn't RickK. Evil Monkey∴Hello 00:27, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
Well, there's always social pressure. Editors tagging articles with VfD, and marking that edit as minor with no edit summary bugs the heck out of me, too. I'll drop a polite note to editors who do that, and it usually corrects the behaviour.
It might not hurt to add a note to the VfD page footer template; it contains the intructions for adding VfD to pages. You could bring that up on Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion to sound out the experts.
With respect to the more general problem of overuse of the 'minor edit' check box, maybe someone with an appropriately diplomatic writing style could put together a boilerplate Wikiquette notice.... --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 00:07, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'll confess to being guilty of this to some extent. I don't have minor edits on by default but am so used to clicking "This is a minor edit" check box as a lot of my edits are minor that I sometimes do it on edits that aren't minor. Evil Monkey∴Hello 00:21, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
And I disagree about votes at VFD. I feel individual votes are minor, only listing for VFD and final consensus are major. (And I admit I have occasionally checked minor, clicked saved and then thought...I didn't mean to make this minor). RJFJR 02:06, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
But that's to use "minor" in a different sense from the Wikipedia usage: "The rule of thumb is that an edit of a page that is spelling corrections, formatting, and minor rearranging of text should be flagged as a "minor edit". A major edit is basically something that makes the entry worth relooking at for somebody who wants to watch the article rather closely, so any "real" change, even if it is a single word, is a major edit." Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:11, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I still have a hard time expecting anyone would care about what I write there.RJFJR 00:58, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
  • Hm, maybe an interesting feature request would be the ability to disallow certain users from marking their edits as minor, iff the admins find they 'abuse' that feature. Radiant_* 09:48, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
  1. Anons have already had the ability to use "m" removed, of course (actually, I haven't checked this, but that's what I've seen explained in various places). If abusers of the feature were to risk being blocked from susing it, there'd presumably have to be a reasonably clear and formal procedure of warnings. Still, that wouldn't be too hard, I'd have thought.
  2. I can see the point of "m" (though, because of its frequent abuse, I always include minor edits in my watch list, and I always check them), but what would be the rationale for distinguishing between "n" and "M"? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:58, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not sure I get it either. It may be useful, but please elaborate? Radiant_* 07:45, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
    • My thoughts on the Major edit (which weren't formed after a prolonged period of thinking, but more as an inital 'what about this' suggestion) was to increase the amount of edits that are minorable, i.e. by introducing a Major edit category, the boundary of normal and minor could be moved up a bit. Thinking about it a bit more, I'm not certain that it would actually work/be used in this manor. If it is desired, then perhaps a better way would be to have more than one category of minor edit, but other than introducing something like an f marker to designate a formating only change I don't see how this could be done simply. Alternatively the f could be separate from the minor marker to allow a minor formating change (mf) (e.g. linking a couple of words) to be distinguished from a larger formating change (f) (e.g. wikification). Thryduulf 21:56, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Possibly a Major flag could be used to flag a very significant change to an article that wouldn't be hidden on the watchlist by susbequent edits until you had viewed that page, at which point the other edits would be 'released' (for want of a better term). Both of these aren't formal proposals - consider them more like brain dumps of incomplete ideas Thryduulf 21:56, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have been told I was using minor too often. If you read the section on what a minor edit is, there are very few things that are considered minor edits. This could be a case where beliefs and policy don't always match. I have been using the tag less, but still do on some small changes that may not be according to policy and I suspect that most editors do the same. Vegaswikian 21:36, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
personaly I just ignore the tag.Geni 01:08, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I ignore the tage when other people use it (though in fact it's correctly used in the majority of cases, I think), but I often use it myself — when, for example, I've changed the capitalisation on headers, added a comma, corrected a spelling, expanded an abbreviation, etc. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:55, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]


Sockpuppetry -- evidence needed?

Though I have a gut feeling that most accusations of sock puppetry are justified and most puppetry is to obnoxious ends, I'm disturbed by the ease with which somebody can plonk the rather amusing sock graphic Image:Carlb-sockpuppet-02.jpg on a user page and the energy that then goes into keeping it there when the (puppet) owner of that page objects and deletes it. That's why I was happy to see the addition of a field in the template to cite evidence -- an addition made over a month ago. As I've written at Template talk:Sockpuppet, I believe that anybody who adds the template should cite the evidence; if the accuser is unable/unwilling to do so, I have considerable sympathy for the (sock) user's complaint of "vandalism" against addition of the template, no matter how repugnant the other behavior of that user may be. (Here is a recent example.) If WP isn't exactly democratic, it should at least not invite lynch-mob "justice". -- Hoary 02:58, 2005 May 29 (UTC)

In the example in question, there's considerable evidence, provided via SlimVirgin, concerning Houston IP addresses. When two or more accounts are used to make the same or very similar edits on the same range or articles in the same style, edit each other's user pages, etc., even without IP-address information, we can conclude that we're dealing with sockpuppets. This isn't, after, a court of law; we're a good deal more sensible than that. If we had to provide the standard of proof required in a court, we'd drown under the consequent levels of uncontrollable sockpuppet vandalism.
I note that you've asked for evidence to be provided when the "sockpuppet" template is used; if anyone could explain how to do that, I'd be grateful. I've tried everything I can think of, and my only solution has been to add it manually to the page, separate from the template text (time-consuming and fiddly). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:13, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
A little bit of experimenting has shown the format to be: {{sockpuppet|[[User:User|User]]|evidence=[[WP:AN/I]]}} - I only guessed to use this after remembering how the {{Copyvio}} tempate works. I'll add this to Template talk:Sockpuppet Thryduulf 11:55, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, thanks; I should have thought of the "copyvio" analogy. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 12:45, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good answers, chaps (or lasses). I'm satisfied now. -- Hoary 13:25, 2005 May 29 (UTC)

purposeful deadend pages

Now listen here, I have no problem with blank pages being deleted. However, In an effort to make Special:Wantedpages useful I have created some blank pages at places like User:Anthony DiPierro/warning because they appear high on the list of wanted pages. Lots of stale links point to this. The obvious solution is to fix Wanted Pages, but that is a long way coming. There are a ton of other userspace pages there that would do no harm in being blank, dead-end pages. I've been threatened as a vandal with being blocked for creating some of them. I'm being bold and these pages do no harm. In the case of making Wanted Pages useful it is helpful. If someone has a solution other than blank dead-end pages at these locations, WONDERFUL. Until that exists, can we leave these in place and stop the vandalism threats? BeBop 15:25, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A while ago Dmcdevit asked on the village pump if Wikipedia:Most wanted pages could be updated. I did so from the database dump and put it on User:Gkhan/Mostwanted. It is a bit out of date now but if you give me 10-20 minutes, I'll have it updated (although it will be from May 16, but hell, that is still alot better than freaking Special:Wantedpages which doesn't seem to work at all) gkhan 15:37, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
What would really be useful is if the list could exclude links from templates. Currently both Special:Wantedpages and your page are both more a list of pages that happen to be included on massive templates than a list of pages that are naturally linked to in the course of writing articles. - SimonP 15:46, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I could definitly modify my code to exclude templates. However, then I must download the "cur" database and import that into my own MySQL. So don't expect until earilest tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'll put up the new wanted-pages including templates. gkhan 16:55, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
On second thought, that would be extremly hard. The thing is that even though links appear in templates, in the database (ie. basically the same thing as "What links here") it appears like the link is on the actual page. It would be very difficult to know what links where from a template and what links where from the page itself (not impossible, but difficult and bug-prone enough that I really don't wish to spend a few days doing it :P) gkhan 18:09, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
No trouble. Perhaps the best option is get some of the huge templates deleted or at least broken up. Templates really shouldn't be linking to dozens of articles. - SimonP
I strongly agree with that. Radiant_* 09:25, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
Or we could take the less technical route altogether. Why don't we do what was done before, but this time go out to a thousand or more, rather than 500. Then sort it as we did before (I'll help) to set aside those from big templates (locomotives and USS articles mostly) and once we get rid of the obvious template interruptions manually, its still useful. And while I don't have that much of a problem with big templates, what exactly is the point of one that is composed of fifty red links? Perhaps we should contact the relavent Projects and request that they create those articles ASAP, as, presumably, a given template that generates these requests exists and is common for a reason. --Dmcdevit 18:45, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah that is true. Why don't you give me a few categories and what the articles are prefixed or with something and i can sort them automatically (like "US Congress nr" goes into category "US Congresses"). Why do it by hand when you can do it with a computer :D gkhan 18:57, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
In any case people should not accuse you of vandalism when you're obviously well-meaning. If they banned you over this I would call that sufficient cause for deadminship. Deco 19:09, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Deco, please see WP:RFA#Thryduulf, and, specifically the opposing votes. gkhan 19:41, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Although I haven't seen it written anywhere, the policy for redundant links on a page seems to be to link only on the first occurance and NOT on subsequent occurances. Is that right?

What about long pages (more than one screen)? A link could occur on the first screen, and then way below a user may see the term again and now he wants to follow the link. (1) The user has to scroll backwards to find the link again, and (2) when he returns, he has to find his place again.

Would it be better to insert the links more than once? --Bubba73 19:21, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links)#Internal links. If the link is repeated more than a screen apart, there's no problem in linking again. --cesarb 19:40, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Fictional Characters

I have noticed a large number of fictional characters being given short articles in Wikipedia. Sometimes it is difficult without reading carefully to tell that a person is fictional and not real. And fictional characters seem to have an automatic presumption of notability to them. In one instance I recall, a VfD was called on what looked like a vanity page, until it was determined that the person in question was fictional. Then an automatic pass was given.

Is there a policy on fictional characters? Shouldn't a fictional character be identified as such at the beginning of the article? I realize it's too late, but I wish that all fictional characters were identified in the title, such as "Darth Vader (character)" Shoaler 14:47, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • There's a guideline that fictional characters should be indentified as such at the beginning of the article, if they don't they should be given a {{fiction}} or {{cleanup-context}} tag. Actually I agree that a way should be found to identify fictional characters in search results, maybe the title idea is worth reconsidering. Darth Vader (Star Wars) would be my choice, except not for things as well known as him. Incidentally, how did you notice them? Were you searching for something else? Kappa 15:03, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, the title idea is a good one. Possibly barring the "Super-Famous" fictional characters, such as Darth Vader or Clark Kent, we would end up with examples such as "Jesse Custer (Preacher (comics))" and "Samuel Vimes (Discworld)". It would certainly make things easier on people who haven't read about them. Especially in cases where the characters may be set in a real-life resembling world. --TVPR 15:51, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agreed. It adds information and would reduce confusion. Changing titles in this way would still leave redirects from the original title, so it wouldn't make the articles harder to find. :ChrisG 22:18, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
See also Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Check your fiction --rbrwr± 15:11, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The example shown in the style guide referenced by User:Rbrwr is a good place to start. Mention the fictional nature of the character, object, thing, event or idea during the first sentence of the article, then proceed from there. No policy needed. Just edit away! I think a change of article titles would make searches unnecessarily more complex. A "this article is about a work of fiction" template applied to them to add a notice box at the top of the articles would be nice as well. Let's not leave any ambiguity if we can help it. Unfocused 16:12, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I support moving all fancruft, fictional universe characters and elements, and similar obsessive, repetitive pages to Wikifan. The hallmark of such inappropriate pages is their template-driven similarity; they often look like cheap reproductions of game materials. Some fictional subjects are appropriate; my rule-of-thumb is to ask, "Is the subject of this page notable in the Real World?" That is, has it had any effect outside of the fantasy universe itself and its fan base? Notability is not associative; an element notable within a notable fantasy universe is not automatically notable itself.
All these otaku-driven pages cheapen and inflate the project as a whole. Name collision, as the first member notes, is a real hazard when things like Graveler are permitted. I hope un-interested parties will help work on this problem at Wikifan. — Xiong熊talk* 02:26, 2005 May 31 (UTC)
Oppose move to Wikifan. As long as their fictional natures is clearly identified in the opening sentence, I believe they belong here. This is not like sister projects Wikiquote or Wiktionary, which have different sorts of material; Wikipedia, Wikiquote, and Wiktionary may have an article on the same subject, each treating it differently. But to move articles to a sister project based on their topic seems needlessly complicated. — Knowledge Seeker দ 03:13, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Support a move of this kind, for the reasons given by Xiong. Yes, moving this stuff could be a bit complicated. Better make a start earlier rather than later, as it proliferates every time some commercial enterprise comes up with the notion of yet another "fantasy universe" as a sound business plan. -- Hoary 04:17, 2005 May 31 (UTC)
Oppose — the existing policy of noting that the person is a fictional character in the intro is more than sufficient. Your suggestion also contradicts existing disambiguation policy, which says that context should not be given unless it is needed for disambiguation. I am ignoring the people using this as a vehicle for advancing anti-fancruftism. Deco 03:54, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I oppose moving "fancruft" anywhere, wikipedia should describe fictional universes too. But we should look for ways to reduce its interference with more important real-world topics, for example on a page of search results. Maybe everything with the "fiction" tag suggested by Unfocused could be demoted in search results. Kappa 07:10, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the idea of a Fictional Universe tag is worth thinking about. It would be useful both for reporting searches, and doing statistics. (The "Wikipedia has 500000 articles" claim would benefit from knowing how many of those are about Teletubby vacuum cleaners, for example.) I have come to change my mind about fancruft on Wikipedia (becoming all the time more inclusionistic), but a sensible tagging system would increase the amount of information in non-intrusive way and help people who are actually interested in the Real World. We need to think more about this (e.g., what about works of fiction that are set in the real world, like Moby Dick?), but I think a binary tagging system does what we want in 99% of the cases, no matter the inevitable debates about how to tag List of ancestors of Jesus Christ. I would prefer such a solution to the proposed one of expanding the article's title. Arbor 12:35, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • In my opinion WP can include various fictional worlds but there is too many articles about secondary and tertiary characters, other one-spot details and continuing attempts to include fanfiction or fan speculation. Most of the "canon" info could be merged into smaller amount of articles about the world and the main protagonists. As for subjects like the List of Ancestors of Jesus Christ, that goes under religion - Skysmith 09:15, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose retitling these articles or moving them to Wikifan. Presumably, the people upset at fancruft (from Star Trek and the like) would give different treatment to some fictional characters, like Fagin, Falstaff, or Grendel. Then we get into silly arguments about which characters are important enough for a Wikipedia article. I don't see a big search problem. Certainly the first sentence of such an article should state that the character is fictional. JamesMLane 09:31, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Propose moving to perennial proposals. --Golbez 12:33, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

Allow blocked users to edit their own user page, talk page, and subpages thereof

This would permit blocked users to respond to allegations against them. If abused, the privilege to edit these particular pages could also be revoked. This would probably require a technical change to the Mediawiki software. No doubt it's true 23:10, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • As you suspect, this is currently not technically possible. I am also not aware of anything that has been proposed in this regard for the next version of the software (1.5) so it is unlikely (imho) to appear any time soon. Blocked users can make their case by email to the administrator who blocked them, or to a different admin if they prefer. In the case of a short block, it might be best to sit it out and work on presenting a reasoned, logical argument as this will always work better than a hot-headed rant. Thryduulf 23:41, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose -- Some users are blocked because of what they put on their user pages. Shall we have different levels of block? No. When we ask the developers to do something, let's choose something more progressive.
There is an appropriate point at which a user who has misbehaved is cautioned without any meatball:HardSecurity action taken; the wise will heed. That is the time for restricting oneself to talk pages in an attempt to resolve the dispute. Failing that, take the block. It's good for your soul. — Xiong熊talk* 02:15, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Taste and public sensibilities

Please forgive a newbie question. Some of the pages court controversy in different ways. For example, there are pages dealing with sexual preferences, religious beliefs, ethnicity, etc. Can you point me in the direction of the policy guidelines for taste so that, if I find an entry that gives explicit details of a sexual practice, makes an unwarranted attack upon a tennet of belief or implies some form of stereotypical supremacy, I can better determine what action to take. A page's entire rationale may be invested in material that some might consider offensive, even at a level of implication, let alone in explicit terms. It may be entirely neutral to coyly suggest as opposed to describe how various things are done but, either way, you may just have described something that would be pornographic, or bigoted or racist to some readers. I know this is "a plague on both your houses" question because editorial adjustments may end up offending both points of view but, if we accept that pages challenging conventional sensibilities serve some public good, simply deleting them would not seem the proper response. -David91 07:27, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that you should probably read WP:NPOV and WP:NOT. I think those two cover the important points. --Carnildo 07:43, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I will respect the policy not to censor to protect minors. However, the NPOV does not deal with the other point. I have encountered several pages in the Wikify listing that appear to prejudge the POV by virtue of the title so, no matter how you might try to balance the arguments, the fact that you started from "there" skews the perception. -David91 08:23, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It is hard to know whether to agree with you without seeing the examples that brought you to your conclusion. Pcb21| Pete 09:23, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, many of the pages have now disappeared from the list but, let's take, "Infamous Hacks and the People that Used them" as an example of the problem (even though it is not controversial in the way I originally intended). When I first saw the title, I assumed it was a reference to broadsheet or newspaper material used to make scurrilous attacks on the reputation of political opponents (of which there would be many infamous examples through history, assuming that a mere list was within the policy of the Wikipedia). When I recovered from my surprise to find it a limited references to computer hacking (as opposed to virus creation and/or worm release?), I wondered what would be on the now necessary page for famous hacks that achieved good outcomes (e.g. from the so-called ethical hackers). We then come to the problem of editing the page as it stands. If we are dealing only with infamy, does that mean we are assuming criminality in which case it is acceptable to label participants as "conspirators" because that might have been the crime of which they were convicted and are we restricted only to those examples where identified hackers were convicted by properly constituted courts. There are instances of hacking where the "criminal" (if such he or she is proven be in the country where the relevants acts were committed, i.e. there should be discussion of initiatory and terminatory theories of jurisdiction) has not been identified so there is no conviction on which to factually base the pejorative label of "conspirator". I could go on tediously but my point really is that I could make a start if the page title was "Hacking", or "Judicial attempts to define hacking", or "Hacking into sensitive computer systems", etc. but as it stands, I cannot make a start. -David91 11:00, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

While intermittently interesting, Infamous_Hacks_and_the_People_that_Used_them is indeed a mess. I'd start by wanting to break it up and rename or merge its constituents, but I shan't do that now as this would complicate the discussion here; also, I'd first want to look at pages about hacking, and right now I lack the needed energy and time. I don't fully understand what your objection is, though. Yes, "conspirator" is normally pejorative (when not jocular), but I see no need to insist on criminal conviction before using the term. -- Hoary 11:16, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Perhaps your answer underlies the depths of my own naivete. I've been assuming that the editor cannot change the title of the page and redistribute the contents among as many other new pages as would be required to separate out the strands into neutral aelements. That's a question, by the way. As to "conspirator" which is but one of about thirty editing problems I immediately identified. In a page which is predominantly legalistic, "conspirator" is a very precise usage and would require that one or more individuals be changed with the offence and/or be convicted of it. But, if the tone of the page is a newsy journalistic listing of what people are said to have done, a less precise but nevertheless pejorative connotation might be legitimate. POV normally requires a factual justification for a label. Journalists use labels less disciminately (for better or worse). -David91 11:31, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you certainly can change the title of an article. You do this by clicking the "move" button at the top. You can also move material from one page to another. Time and energy permitting (and they do not), I'd look at various about hacking and see if some of the stuff in this messy article was duplicated elsewhere to better effect; if it was, I'd delete it from this article. I'd then look for a list of hackers, and if none existed would create a new article for this purpose, cutting and pasting material from the old article to the new one. Finally, I'd see how I could rename ("move") and improve the resulting collection of infamous hacks.-- Hoary 11:41, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Sorry to have been so dim. Learning on the job is a challenge. Thank you all for your patience. I not sure I know enough about the contemporary world of computer hacking to do this page although I might play around with it later tonight. -David91 11:49, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Commons: When? Why?

When and why should one put images/figures into the Wikimedia Commons [3] rather than creating local files on Wikipedia? What are the advantages/disadvantages of using one rather than the other?

This information is probably written down somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it. Dragons flight 14:53, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

One advantage is that it is accessible to all Wikipedias (across langs). Guettarda 15:12, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Any images that could be used across different wiki projects are great candidates to go to the commons. Stuff like personal mugshots for your userpage and images to show a problem you have specifically on Wikipedia, probably belong here. And then there's the copyright policy on both projects you need to take into account. Mgm|(talk) 20:11, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
Any file which is available under a free license should be uploaded to Commons to allow for easy use on all projects. The only real disadvantage is that you need to create an account there, and remember which site you're on. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:06, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

While I appreciate the above comments, I haven't heard a clear explanation of why I should add material to Commons. The only argument seems to be that it could make it easier for material to be used in other projects, but merely releasing an image under the GFDL does all the heavy lifting there. Someone looking for free images is likely to make Wikipedia one of their first steps, so Commons strikes me as largely redundant. So let me phrase my question more directly, why should I bother with Commons? Dragons flight 06:12, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Releasing under the GFDL is the easy part. Uploading, tagging, and providing a description is the hard part. If you upload to the English Wikipedia, someone who wants to use the image on the French Wikipedia would have to save it and re-upload it. Same with someone on the Spanish Wikipedia. Same with someone on the Swahili Wikipedia.

On the other hand, if you upload it to Commons, all someone on the French Wikipedia would have to do is insert an [[Image:]] tag in the appropriate article. Someone who wants to use it on Memory Alpha or Wikinfo would still have to save and re-upload it, but finding is a lot easier. --Carnildo 06:41, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You say a number of interesting things. However, let me turn this around, why should the Swahili Wikipedia tolerate images that are tagged and described in English? Why would this Wikipedia want to use images that are described only in French? In that respect it actually seems better for someone to reupload the image and describe it in the appropriate language. Am I missing something? And I would disagree that uploading, tagging, etc is hard. Compared to the effort the creator of the image likely went to, it is unlikely that writing a description is more than a minor part of the process. You also say that "finding is a lot easier". Is there some quality of Commons that really it makes it much easier to find media related to a topic than say searching for that topic on Wikipedia? If an image becomes orphaned or obsoleted, I can understand putting it somewhere else, but for images in active use on Wikipedia, its not clear to me that having it hosted on Commons would make any significant difference on how easily people find the image. Dragons flight 00:04, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
The big difference is that Commons is one place. Wikipedia is somewhere upwards of 100 different places, as m:List of Wikipedias indicates. --Carnildo 00:21, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You should place an image on Commons if you think someone might use it in another Wiki project. For example, if you put an image on a page, and someone from the German Wikipedia links across and thinks s/he might want to use that image in that Wiki, all they need to do is copy the link if it is in the Commons. If, on the other hand, the image is only on en. then they will have to download the image and reload it onto their own Wiki. If your image is a graph with a lot of commentary in English it may me less useful in the Commons because it cannot be directly loaded into a foreign language Wikipedia. Similarly, if you come across an image in a non-english Wiki, if it's in the Commons you can add it directly to your article just by copying the image location (and you don't have to worry about what the copyright tag in Estonian actually says). Guettarda 06:42, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • The Commons aims to be the largest collection of free images on the net. Uploading it there centralizes all images in one place for easy access and sorting. Mgm|(talk) 14:18, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

It's also not just other Wikipedias that can use the images directly from Commons, but all other Wikimedia Foundation projects. So, if you have an image that is useful to the English Wikipedia, it might also be useful to the English Wikibooks, English Wiktionary, English Wikinews, etc, as well as all the projects in other languages. Gentgeen 00:17, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't using images from the Commons (assuming they are tagged in a language foreign to the user) run the risk of having images incorrectly used?
For example: Consider this image of Benedict XVI from the Commons, with it's English description. A German user, who doesn't speak English, is writing an article on the pope's vestments, and while searching the Commons for images, comes upon this image and co-opts it for the German Wikipedia. He writes the description "the standard vestment of the Pope, worn for all public engagements." Unfortunatly, what the user would have known, if the image tags had been in German, is that the image is of the Pontiff when he was still a Cardinal, and wearing his cardinal's vestments.
Now, I realize that this scenario wouldn't cause an international incedent, but still, it's incorrect, and it pushes false information. I'm sure another user (one who edits more controversial areas of the wiki) could come up with a scenario where such a use would be an international incedent. Isn't this an inherent risk of publishing images in the Commons? Aren't they better off in the individual Wikipedias, where in this case, the need for a German tag for the German Wikipedia (where the image will be uploaded) would necessitate a translation and thus a realization of the mistake? Essjay · talk 10:38, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
Consider the case of someone translating articles between Wikis. Frequently they have a good command of the two languages they are working in, but it is still a fair bit of effort. Adding the task of downloading several images, uploading them to the other Wiki, tagging them, translating the image description page, attributing and linking to the original image source, and finally translating the caption and adding the images to the translated article, tends to make it too much trouble to bother. As such, quite a lot of translated articles don't get illustrated, or only get the lead image (pick a few decent sized articles and try looking through some of their inter-wiki links on the left).
Now if all the relevant images are already on Commons the translator just has to copy the same image tags and translate the captions.
It cuts both ways. If you look at some of the requests on Wikipedia:Translation into English, you will find many of them are will illustrated on their native Wiki. For example the request to translate material from the de:Spirale, the English article at spiral. All those diagrams would be much easier to use on the English Wiki if only they were all hosted on the Commons, but they were mostly created in 2003 before Commons existed so they are all actually on the German wiki and can't be used directly.
Besides, the intention is for images on Commons to have captions and descriptions translated into a range of languages. See for example commons:Image:Robal.png -- Solipsist 12:30, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I know, I know. Really, I just wanted to be the bad guy for once...I'm always Mr. "I don't get involved with controversey because I'm an academic not an attorney" and I wanted to be ornery. I certainly see the point of having images in the Commons, although I do think that images should be multi-tagged, at least in whatever constitutes the "most popular languages" (the ones surrounding the globe on the [4] page, perhaps?). As long as they are properly tagged (and truly, the tags could probably be auto-translated with something like [5] at least enough that anyone coming along to find the image could make out what it was supposed to say. Now, I'll go find something to do as pennance for being bad. Essjay · talk 14:02, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
Essjay may not want to play the bad guy any more, but I am happy to. Why is Robal.png not a perfect example of situations in which the commons must ultimately fail? That image clearly requires an explanation. Presently that explanation is provided in 3 langauges, but what about the next 3 languages, and the 10 after that, and the 50 after that. Surely we do not want the commons image description to try to cover every language for which there is a wikipedia version. Right now, any wikipedia could make a copy of that image and provide a description entirely in their own langauge without the clutter, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to me. Of course, commons could implement multi-lingual support so that a single image had many different description pages depending on language preference, but we aren't there yet. Dragons flight 15:17, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
Oh, I will grant you some of the translation issues on the Commons makes my mind boggle. And I don't think that all the tools are in place to make it easy (for example many of the categories are effectively English, except the natural history taxonomies which are Latin and makes me have to think twice). However, it does look like a big step forward for sharing images compared to having the pictures on the individual Wiki's. -- Solipsist 20:40, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion

The draft for this new fD page has been quite stable for a while, so this is the last chance for any objections to be raised. Please comment on talk. WP:TFD and WP:CFD have been notified earlier, and a WP:RFC has been filed. If noone complains within a week, we will start using this process. -- grm_wnr Esc 10:31, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Category sorting

At Wernher von Braun there is something of a revert war over whether the categories should sort by von or Braun. I have been unable to find anything relevant in the information on categories to decide which option is right. I have no preference either way but would like to see a stop to the continual changing of this on the article. Have I missed a guideline on this or do we not actually have one and need to create something. Evil Monkey∴Hello 01:21, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

I decided to see what the other langauges did regarding this. De, es, fr, it, hu, nl, no, pl, fi and sv all sort it as Braun, Wernher von. Pt sorts it as Wernher von Braun. So I would go with sorting it under Braun, Wernher von - especially as he was German and this is what the German Wikipedia does. Thryduulf 07:14, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
He was also American, in America the last half of his life, the most relevant time to consider for indexing purposes, with his children American-born and American-raised. Here is a sorting all Americans will understand, you enter name in search box to find him.
As I explained on Talk:Wernher von Braun, common sense would be the easiest guideline. Where are people going to find him the easiest? Maybe less than 1% of English Wikipedia users would look first under the B's. Of the 99% who'd look first under V, maybe only 10% would think to look under B if they didn't find him under V. In a short list, they might find him by accident. Just look at that talk page; when he is referred to by surname only, it is always "von Braun" and never "Braun" alone. Gene Nygaard 11:33, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'll bet his kids complained about being last in line when their school did something alphabetically. Gene Nygaard 11:47, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Is this 1% figure a guess or a real value? I am English and I would look under the B's first then v second. David D. 16:47, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This is an interesting policy issue since it touches on cultural expectations. In Chinese, for example, the Western equivalent of the surname is the first name. So, Lim Swee would be sorted by 'L' in Chinese-centric systems. Equally, David Marshall (Singapore's first Chief Minister) would be listed under D. Now transplant these people into an Anglo-centric system. Local expectations would place surnames as the last name. This might be justifiable for poor Mr Marshall who never expected to be a D in the first place. But do we respect the culture of origin for Lim, or do we apply anglo-centric criteria regardless? To have no policy is potentially to defeat users from the original culture who may search for their expected configuration of name only to find no hit. Does that show respect or neutrality? So I think names should always be presented in their original format for listing or sorting purposes even though this may produce an apparently anarchic result from purely an anglo-centric POV. -David91 08:22, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

First name/last name sorting is indeed often based on cultural differences, but it only makes sense to apply one or the other on an across-the-board basis, not some screwball hodgepodge in one indexing system. Of course, spatial arrangement of first or last isn't the only possibility, and family name/given name would get Lim under L and Marshall under M, a quite sensible arrangement. Above all, remember the naming convention rules, dealing with how a person is best known in English. Gene Nygaard 11:33, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
First off I'd like to state that I am not english nor american so I can't speak for how it is done in english countries, but I would like to point out that sorting it under "von" would make it jump to the v-section, along with all the other von's of the world. This is simply unintelligent. Right now I am looking at "Leonard Maltins 2000 Movie and Video Guide" (how does this apply? stay tuned...). I wish to look up the excellent movie "The Birds" by the Lord of Terror, Alfred Hitchcock. Where do I look? "The"? No, I look at "Birds, The". It is standard procedure to not sort people after their titles or things that are common to many people. Should Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (assuming he weren't pope) be sorted into "Cardinal" or "Ratzinger"? Ratzinger obviously! As for your claim that 99% of wikipedians would be looking at v instead of B is just absurd, look at Thryduulfs results! All other wikipedias (excepting pt, I don't know what the hell they're doing) sort it under B! If you add the size of all those wikipedias together, I bet my nads on that it'd be bigger than en! And as David91 points out, we shouldn't have some sort of anglo-centric view of wikipedia, we come from all over the world! gkhan 13:13, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
Didn't I specify English Wikipedia? Yes, I said "English Wikipedia users". The English Wikipedia should indeed be "Anglo-centric" (in a broad sense), when it comes to use of the English language. But note further that in the specific case of Wernher von Braun, we are dealing with a surname rather than a title; not only after he came to American, but the same would have held true had he stayed in Germany. It never was just a title, since he never had any other surname, and he never was known as just Braun. So your Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger example it totally off the point. If he were Werner Schmidt, Graf von Braun or something like that, it would be a different story. Or take the case of William Thomson, who late in life was granted a new title, one which didn't exist before, 1st Baron of Kelvin. We don't index him under "B" for Baron or "L" for Lord or "o" for of or "1" or "F" for 1st. We index him under "K" for Kelvin since after he was granted that title, it is how he was and still is generally known. People did not call him "of Kelvin" when they referred to him without a given name, they used Kelvin or more formally Lord Kelvin. However, in this case, since much of his work in physics was done under the name "Wiliam Thomson" before he ever acquired this title, which nobody else ever held before or since, a strong case could be made for indexing him under "T" for Thomson.
Note also that we want it to jump to the "V" section, not to the "v" section, since all lowercase letters follow all uppercase letters in normal Wikipedia category indexing.
In English indexing, the English language articles and prepositions are often ignored, while foreign language articles and prepositions are often indexed like anything else. To use an example exactly parallel to your example about indexing of The Birds, look in the alphabetical listing at Amazon.com and in Category:1981 films for Das Boot. How does Leonard Maltin index that one? Gene Nygaard 14:20, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What we could use is some more guidelines on the simple things, such as:

  1. Pointing out clearly how the piping works in those category names. Specifically point out that whatever is put into the indexing box is not displayed when the category is viewed would be a good start. (One of those honorific freaks recently tried to index Robert Falcon Scott under "Scott, Captain Sir Robert Falcon". Granted, this isn't going to make much difference unless you happened to have a category with a whole bunch of "Scott" entries, but if you did, nobody would look for what would be displayed as "Robert Falcon Scott" (without the honorifics) to be listed under the Cs.
  2. Making more explicit the ad hoc convention of using a space or an asterisk in the sorting to put the primary article related to a category (often of the same name as the category, except perhaps for singular/plural) at the top of the category listing.
  3. Guidelines on whether it is acceptable to categorize redirects, and instructions on how it can be done if it is acceptable, which in some of the more difficult cases to determine would likely allow the category to index it both ways.
  4. Spelling out the fact that the category indexing is case sensitive, so that if you want only one listing rather than all uppercase letters first then all lowercase letters, the first letter of the piped indexing needs to be capitalized for indexing purposes, even if it generally is not capitalized otherwise. Gene Nygaard 14:20, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)


Contrast 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole and its logical category indexing

with Gerardus 't Hooft with what seems illogical to me, especially in light of the above:

but note further that the former could be a candidate for indexing of the redirect from Hooft-Polyakov monopole. Gene Nygaard 14:20, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, you obviously feel very strongly about this. I ask myself, how can I convince you that it is infact standard to not sort after "von" (or, as you point out "Von")? Well, are there any encyclopedic precendents of this? Let's look at the 1911 encyclopedia britanica. Do they sort Johann Wolfgang von Goethe under "G" or "V". Take a look. Do they sort Ludwig van Beethoven (even though this is a van, the same princple should apply) under v? Take a look. You can find countless examples of this if you you just do a search on their site for "von". And note that all articles that both Beethoven and Goethe does not sort under "von" or "van" in their respective categories. Now, can you please accept that it is standard to not sort under "v" regardless of where you are!
As a side note, the english wikipedia is (unlike most other wikipedias) not restricted to one country or one set of standards. We do for instance not subscribe to a standard set of spelling. It is, in lack of a better word, the international encyclopedia. I'd wager that a significant portion of wikipedians do not speak english as their first language. So, please refrain from saying things like "99% of wikipedians would look at v" when it is clearly not true. gkhan 15:50, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
Sometimes silence says more than words, as in your non-reply about movie indexing.
Both Goethe and Beethoven are referred to in English as "Goethe" and "Beethoven", not "von Goethe" and "van Beethoven"; "von Braun" is referred to in English as "von Braun" and not "Braun".
Neither "von Goethe" nor "van Beethoven" spent the last half of their lives in the United States—a place where we don't have "titles of nobility". And both may well have chosen more sensible "American names" if they had! Gene Nygaard 16:17, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
As for the films it was mostly a joke, i thought you understood that. Please, can't you realise that en.wikipedia is not an american encyclopedia! You sort people named "von Something" under "Something", just look at the search i did on the encyclopedias site. Where is the harm in this? It is obviously the standard, and we should adhere to encyclopedic standards! Isn't this enough for you? gkhan 16:30, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

I just looked at the Category:German_scientists and there is a clear consensus (11:1) to index under a name such as ‘Braun’ and not the ‘von’. Worse the erratic indexing in wikipedia is highlighted by the fact that first names and middle names are used for indexing??? If all lists and categories have these types of issues then there needs to be a large clean up job. It may be worth having a specific link to style on every category page so that the whole community is aware of the conventions.

Below are selected entries from the german scientist category.

B

  • Adolf von Baeyer
  • Emil du Bois-Reymond
  • Johann Friedrich von Brandt

F

  • Johann Fischer von Waldheim middle name indexed

G

  • Albrecht von Gräfe

H

  • Hermann von Helmholtz
  • August Wilhelm von Hofmann
  • Alexander von Humboldt

I

  • Hermann von Ihering

J

  • Johann Gottlieb Georgi first name indexed

K

  • Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz middle name indexed

L

  • Justus von Liebig
  • Hubert von Luschka

M

  • Manfred von Ardenne first name indexed

S

  • Johann Baptist von Spix

V

  • Wernher von Braun

David D. 16:40, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Neither Fisher nor Kekulé are middle names as that term is normally used. They are different from, for example, the Wilhelm in August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Both are surnames. The toponyms are additional surnames. Gene Nygaard 16:54, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ah, well that explains the middle names. I have to admit it did seem strange since indexing with a middle name would seem to be premediatated, whereas indexing with a first name would merely be an error. David D. 17:02, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Here are some more relevant categories:

Category:American astronomers

  • George Van Biesbroeck indexed "Van Biesbroeck, George"
  • Tom Van Flandern indexed "Van Flandern, Tom"
  • Peter van de Kamp indexed "Kamp, Peter van de" (he is also listed in Category:Dutch astronomers in that way)

Category:American biologists

  • Leigh Van Valen indexed "Van Valen, Leigh"

Category:American physicists

  • John Hasbrouck van Vleck indexed "Van Vleck, John Hasbrouck"
  • Robert J. Van de Graaff indexed "Graaff, Robert J. Van de"

Category:American zoologists

  • James Ellsworth De Kay default to title so under "J", referred to as "he" in text, alternate spellings DeKay or Dekay
  • John Xantus de Vesey indexed "Xantus de Vesey, John"

Gene Nygaard 18:54, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The thing with these names, which also applies to Dick Van Dyke and Martin Van Buren is that they capitalize their "Vons". Our herr Braun doesen't. I have no problem with sorting under V if the name is capitalized that way, but it makes no sense if you do it with "von". gkhan 14:56, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
And ohh yeah, the on ly one in your examples that didn't was John Hasbrouck van Vleck. However, in that case wikipedia is wrong, if you look at the page linked to in his article [6] you see that the proper way to capitalize his name is John Hasbrousk Van Vleck. So, now can we come to an agreement on this? gkhan 15:00, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
It's not impossible that it is spelled both ways, even today and more so for various older people, and even by the person with that name. There's no guarantee that some Nobel winners page is the one that has it "correct" in any case. Amazon.com does have Travels with Dirac in the Rockies by John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, another indication that it may be most often capitalized, but not proving that it always is or always should be. Others use both "v" and "V" within the text of their own articles here on Wikipedia, and in various sources elsewhere as well—so there are cases in which even determining whether or not it is capitalized is not clear-cut.
Note also that if you spell it right with a c rather than the second s John Hasbrouck Van Vleck does redirect to the current article.
There are several others besides Wernher von Braun who are, and should be (probably more than "are"), indexed under "V", as well as some indexed under "v" which should likely be changed to "V". Of course, "Van de Graaff" should be under "V" rather than "G" by your rules, too, not just in by my different, not fully specified, criteria.
Whether or not it is in fact a title, or just a disambiguation reference to place of origin or residence, or just a surname, or both a title and a surname, and whether or not there are other surnames in addition to that title, are also factors, and in the case of titles, when the title was granted and whether it continued throughout life thereafter. Time and places of residence are other factors.
Some of the oldest ones, especially, should probably be indexed under given name instead. Gene Nygaard 15:36, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
One thing I've noticed is that "football" fans are often smarter than art critics and astronomers and politicians, or at least more likely to index people where I would look for them. Gene Nygaard 15:46, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Or that may just be an indication that they haven't yet attracted the attention of editors hell-bent on eliminating all "von" and "van" terms from the indexing. Gene Nygaard

Sorry to add a tangential note but, out of interest, I looked at the Wiki entry for Singh and found the completely insulting explanation that Singh is a surname!!!!!! It is this form of error that makes non-Anglo readers boil. In fact, the names of Singh and Kaur are added as the last names to Sikhs to eliminate any assuption that might be made about caste based on family names. Having read the exchange of views above, it is obvious that a formal policy document should be drawn up to standardise how names are to be cited. I repeat my earlier view that Wiki should always follow the format of the country of origin to preserve neutrality. That Anglo-speakers might have restructed the name or anglicised it in some patronising way should be quietly forgotten. -David91 17:35, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes I agree. Can we please agree that he should be sorted under B, since that seems to be consensus both on wikipedia and on EB? gkhan 17:52, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
I would favour under B. David D. 17:57, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In the US at least, expectations are strongly influenced by the President Martin Van Buren, who is conventionally sorted under V. -R. S. Shaw 19:50, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Since you pointed this out, I will give you first chance to fix the indexing of his "First Lady", his daughter-in-law Angelica Van Buren. If it isn't changed in a couple of days, I'll do it myself. Gene Nygaard 13:23, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is an obvious solution to most of these problems, which is to index the article under both conventions (e.g. Braun and Von, or maybe von). Unfortunately I don't think Mediawiki is currently up to it. A possible syntax for this feature would be [ [ Category:XX|Braun, W|Von Braun, W ] ] -R. S. Shaw 19:50, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Would two category listings do it? e.g.
[[Category:XX|Braun, Werner von]]
[[Category:XX|Von Braun, Werner]]
If so I'd be sure to add a html comment explaining why it is in the same category twice. Thryduulf 20:09, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
How about if its von it is not the top level sort, if it is Von then it is the top level sort? Vegaswikian 22:10, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I now think that's right - 'Von' if it is the sort key, otherwise 'von'. The two variant Category entries doesn't work. I've set that up in Jacob van Campen, but the Category:1596 births only lists him once, using the sort key from the second of the two Category entries. Do people think it would be worthwhile puting in a feature request for the multiple key capability? -R. S. Shaw 02:18, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
That capitalization may be a useful first approximation—but that's all it is. Gene Nygaard 13:56, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • I'll give here a translation of the Dutch article for which describes the use of words like "von" and "'t".

A tussenvoegsel is a word that's placed between someone's first and last name, but is still part of this family name.

Strictly speaking, though, these "tussenvoegsels" don't belong to someone's last name. For example, someone who is named "De Vries" (ed:the Dutch don't capitalize the word "de" when it's part of a full name) is found under "V" in the phone book - not the "D". Therefore "tussenvoegsels" are to be entered in databases seperately. Another reason for this is that one should be able to easily search and sort on last name.

In German, this "tussenvoegsel" disappears if there's no first name in front of it.

Capitalization

In Dutch, the "tussenvoegsel gets a capital letter if no name or initial precedes it. So it's: "Jan de Vries", but: "de heer De Vries en de heer en mevrouw Jansen-De Vries".

In Flanders, "tussenvoegsels" keep their original capitalization: mevrouw van der Velde, mevrouw J. van der Velde, Jan Vanden Broucke. ***

To me it makes sense to ignore words like "von" with indexing unless they are capitalized. Not only is it common practice when databases, phonebooks and other encyclopedias are concerned, but think about it. Would it really be helpful if you needed to go through a massive list of names that start with a "V". And categorizing all Arabians with names like "al Something" and "el Something else" under "a" and "e" would really clog up the categories for those letter? Mgm|(talk) 16:22, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
    • BTW I agree with User:Thryduulf when it comes to comparing our system with that of other pedias. Why should we use a system that isn't common to any other wikipedia? Even the German one, which is obivously where the name originated from. Mgm|(talk) 16:25, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
Where the name "came from" isn't half as important as where it ends up. It is not just the spelling which might change, but often the very nature of the name as well.
"Common practice when databases, phonebooks and other encyclopedias are concerned"? Get real. I'll bet you that Werner von Braun was never listed under "B" in any English-language phonebook, the ones he was listed in during the last thirty-odd years of his life, most of his adult life.
In English, our databases never have a separate field for tussenvogsels. They are indexed with the last name.
The American Eleuthère Irénée du Pont is properly indexed in the Wikipedia categories as "Du Pont, Eleuthère Irénée".
A. E. van Vogt is properly indexed "Van Vogt, A. E." and also in a better way in some categories, though not the way it currently is written in the title, "Van Vogt, A.E."
The American Hendrik Willem van Loon is properly indexed "Van Loon, Hendrik Willem".
Johannes Diderik van der Waals is indexed "van der Waals, Johannes Diderik" but should be indexed "Van der Waals, Johannes Diderik" to get him in with the other V entries, not in a separate one folowing Z. After all, it is Van der Waals bonding, Van der Waals equation, Van der Waals force, and Van der Waals radius and not Waals bonding, Waals equation, Waals force, and Waals radius. People using an English encyclopedia are going to look for him first under V.
In this English Wikipedia, there are several Belgians with a capital "V" in "Van" indexed under Van _____, and some Dutch with lowercase "v" in "van" indexed under Van _____.
Indexing rules are, in fact, often language specific, or location specific. Had Wernher von Braun moved to Iceland, you would likely have found him in the phonebook under W, whether or not he adopted an Icelandic style patronymic, wouldn't you?
Of course, Vietnamese "Van" names are different, too. Gene Nygaard 03:29, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Chicago Manual of Style sez

From The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition:

8.7 - English names with particles. Many names borne by people in English-speaking countries include particles such as de, d', de la, la, von, van, and ten. Practice with regard to capitalizing and spacing the particles varies widely, and confirmation should be sought in a biographical dictionary or other authoritative source. When the surname is used alone, the particle is generally retained, capitalized or lowercased (though always capitalized when beginning a sentence) and spaced as in the full name. Le is always capitalized, as are La and L', when not preceded by de. See also 8.10—-20.

  • Thomas De Quincey; De Quincey
  • Robert M. La Follette; La Follette
  • Diane DeGette; DeGette
  • John Le Carré; Le Carré
  • Alfonse D'Amato; D'Amato
  • Pierre-Charles L'Enfant; L'Enfant
  • Walter de la Mare; De la Mare
  • Abraham Ten Broeck; Ten Broeck
  • Daphne du Maurier; Du Maurier
  • Wernher von Braun; von Braun [Emphasis added]
  • Page duBois; duBois
  • Stephen Van Rensselaer; Van Rensselaer
  • W. E. B. Du Bois; Du Bois (but see 8.5)
  • Robert van Gulik; van Gulik


8.12' - German, Italian, and Portuguese names. In the original languages, particles in German, Italian, and Portuguese names are lowercased, and are usually dropped when the last name is used alone. But if the form with the particle is the one familiar to English speakers, it should be used.

  • Alexander von Humboldt; Humboldt
  • Maximilian von Spee; Spee
  • Heinrich Friedrich Karl von und zum Stein; Stein
  • Ludwig van Beethoven; Beethoven
  • Giovanni da Verrazano; Verrazano
  • Friedrich von Steuben; von Steuben
  • Vasco da Gama; da Gama
  • Luca della Robbia; della Robbia

but

  • Leonardo da Vinci; Leonardo

--Calton | Talk 02:34, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)


Why don't you ask the folks over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Librarians? I bet they've encountered this dilemma before..... — Catherine\talk 11:51, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Preempting impersonators

Is it acceptable to create an "impersonation" account of yourself, throw away the password and forget it just in order to prevent an impersonator making it and abusing it? For instance would it be acceptable for me to make three accounts, User:SjakkaIIe, User:SjakkaIle, and User:SjakkalIe (with capital "I"s instead of small "L"s at strategic locations) to preempt someone making it? Since only I would know about the password, nobody else would have access to these accounts so there would be no point in blocking them, and no administrator assistance would be needed. I realize that this might start clogging up the Special:Listusers page however. Sjakkalle 11:44, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I have no problem with it, indeed I've wondered about creating user:ThryduuIf before but never got around to it. It might be worth making a note on the user page that it was you creating it for anti-impersonation reasons - perhaps inside <tt> tags for clarity. I would make the note as your normal user though to try and make it easier to identify the real ones done like this if a vandal should use this method in future. Thryduulf 13:26, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I concur with Thryduulf's remarks. If it becomes a common practice in the future, someone might want to throw together an appropriate template and category for those User pages. --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 13:35, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'm paranoid, so over a year ago I created a bunch of these. Some examples; user:mav, user:Daniel Mayer (my real name), and user:maverick149 (spelt with a k). I have not used any of those other accounts to edit and I'm not even sure what their passwords are. --mav
I just today created an alternate account called user:ZockPuppet in case I want to vote twice in a poll without anyone noticing ;) I figured that if I add confirmation from both accounts that the alternate account is mine, that should be proof enough. Zocky 21:51, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sjakalle, a number of people have already done this. (I know because I've raised the alarm on several of them, only to find that they're innocent. Oops.) I would definitely encourage you to create these "DoppeIganger" accounts for yourself. Please do leave a note like Thryduulf suggests, signed with your normal account, so I don't jump on you too! :-) FreplySpang (talk) 01:06, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, I have gone ahead and created all three accounts and left a note on each of them using my real account. Sjakkalle (Check!) 07:12, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I took the liberty of creating a template for these "Doppelganger accounts." It can be found at Template:Doppelganger. Insert {{doppelganger|Your user name}} on the Doppelganger account's user page and talk page, with "your user name" replaced with your primary account. That way, should anyone have questions, there are automatic links to your "real" account. You could also put a note below it on the talk page from your "real" account if you want, just to be sure. For an example, see my Doppelganger: User:Essgay -- Essjay · talk 12:09, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Quotation marks and apostrophes

A proposal to drop the requirement to use straight quotes and apostrophes has been made on the Manual of Style’s talk page. I support that idea with enthusiasm, but would like to see more focussed opposition to it (if such opposition exists), before we change WP:MOS. To that end I moved the debate to its own page and added a short introduction. See Wikipedia talk: Manual of Style (Quotation marks and apostrophes). Arbor 07:10, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ordering Definitions

When a term is defined which has multiple definitions, what order is preferred? In order of historic usage? In order of contemporary relevance? Or some other order? patsw 15:24, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

AFAIK there is no set order, as long as the order used is NPOV. For example, it might be chronological or alphabetical. In some cases it is apropriate to have the main explanatory reference at the top and then the rest sorted in some way. Without knowing which term, I can't really be more specific. Thryduulf 16:04, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • This is similar to the problem of article names within the disambig area. America's Sweetheart is for the album which points to a disambig article at America's Sweetheart (disambiguation) which redirects to America's sweetheart. That now has two other entries, Mary Pickford and America's Sweetheart (movie). I beleive there is also a musical with the same name. I would think that Mary Pickford owns that nickname so America's Sweetheart should be the disambig page and the album should be changed to America's Sweetheart (album). Vegaswikian 22:44, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • I know nothing about those articles, so I can't say what is right. If you think a move is needed put a message on the talk pages. As this is likely to need an admin to do some moving, then also put a note at Wikipedia:Requested moves (WP:RM). Thryduulf 23:07, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Chronological order in which direction?

Both Howard Hawks and Pam Grier contain lists of their films, in chronological order. Hawks' list starts with the newest and continues to the oldest; Grier's does the reverse. Does some policy specify which way around a chronological order should be? (I strongly prefer the "Grier" order, oldest to newest.) -- Hoary 06:48, 2005 Jun 4 (UTC)

I believe the Wikipedia:Filmographies and Discographies guidelines support oldest to newest. - SimonP 14:08, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
It says this tentatively, saying that it's a matter of dispute. Wondering about that dispute, I looked at the talk page. There's a desultory discussion at the top of the page about the reverse recommendation (newest head, oldest foot). Just now I took the liberty of moving this down the talk page to the top of the section "Ascending or descending". That section has the following plea from 10 July 2003: Can we please have a vote on whether film-/discographies should be ascending or descending order? This elicited a grand total of, wait for it, three votes. "Descending order" (two votes) outpolled "Filmographies descending, discographies ascending" by the slimmest of margins: a single vote. Or to put it another way, it gained twice as much support (two rather than one). Unfortunately this exercise in democracy plunged into the bathetic with the question that immediately followed it: does descending = oldest first or youngest first? No reply. A brave soul then wrote: I intend to go through wikipedia and edit all discographies to conform to the style suggested on this page. Er, good . . . . but which style might this be?
I shall therefore ask the question again (a few minutes from now). Please head over to Wikipedia talk:Filmographies and Discographies to have your say. -- Hoary 02:37, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)

bot to wipe out unfavorable User talk comments

User:Janna, a bot, apparently makes regular sweeps of User_talk:Anthony DiPierro, wiping it clean. when one goes to the trouble to dig, the long, convoluted edit history of User_talk:Anthony_DiPierro, is found to be overwhelmingly negative. is this history-hiding an approved use of a bot? shouldn't wikipedia users be able to see immediately the history of another user, or at least have the chance to expose it regularly without fighting a bot? even Anthony_DiPierro's supposed User_talk archive has been wiped clean, and is only accessible via edit history reviews. what is the fundamental difference between this and the origins of sockpuppetry? both are attempts to mislead, hiding one's true wikipedia nature -- via bot in this case. SaltyPig 20:49, 2005 Jun 4 (UTC)

Seems highly inappropriate, and not what the bot was intended for. I'm not sure it's restricted to unfavourable comments, and chances are it's not a bot but a human using a bot account. Still, it does have the bot flag (I assume?), and is a misuse of that bot account. --W(t) 21:15, 2005 Jun 4 (UTC)

Use of language

OK, so this is an English Encyclopaedia, but there are numerous methods of spelling in English (two most obvious are American and British). Is there any policy of a correct spelling (I notice the use of centre, colour etc in places), and if not can we make a policy with... hopefully a bot that that can implement much of it?

Even though I'm a Briton myself, I imagine wikipedia would use American English (as its more internationally prominent...?).

Obviously places such as Trafford Centre (a location in the UK) should keep its spelling, but in the article where it says "The centre contains many..." should be "The centre contains many..."

You get me. Thoughts? -- Tomhab 11:59, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • I think basic policy is to not convert articles from British to American, or from American to British. However, if an article is inconsistent, corrections to make it either "pure" British or "pure" American are welcomed. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:17, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hmmm oh well - don't like it but I guess at least there is a policy -- Tomhab 13:46, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  1. It's not clear that U.S. English is more internationally prominent, as other forms of English (Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, etc., often (but not always) share British English spellings.
  2. The policy is, roughly, that an article should stay in the form used by the first editor unless the subject is relevant to a particular form of English, in which case it can be changed. Thus, the articles that I've created on Don Rendell and Placide Tempels are written in British English, and shouldn't be changed, but the articles that I started on Alice Coltrane and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars can be Americanised. I hope that that's clear. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:06, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • You are correct in assuming that these things have been discussed before, and some sort of policy was arrived at. Such questions are covered in Wikipedia's own style guide, Wikipedia:Manual of Style. There is a section on national varietes of English; incidentally, centre vs center is used as an example. Arbor 20:29, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • U.S. English is more internationally prominent on the Internet. Fredrik | talk 01:14, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Three thoughts: consistency of style and language on any given page is best; those making editorial changes to existing pages should respect the original style and language choices and achieve consistency throughout the edited page; and whether or not Frederik is statistically correct or not, every country of native speakers has different linguistic conventions and usages, and the idea that there will be two gold standards of Britishisms or Americanisms is not neutral because it disrespects all the other native-speaking-Englishisms that, by their own terms, are equally valid. -David91 05:43, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Welcome message

I don't suppose you might consider adding to the welcome message the advice that it is helpful to have a program open that one can save editing work to before hitting the "see Preview" or "save" buttons? I know it implies a certain lack of faith in the Wiki servers, but as an aging newbie, I still have trouble remembering to save anything longer than a couple of sentences that required actual thinking. Just did it again. The time wasted in reconstructing the work is considerable. Plus one's state of mind suffers tremendously upon seeing yet again Sorry- . It would seem friendly to warn newcomers in some NPOV way. Copying now. --Mothperson 16:20, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good browsers let you get your text back with the back-button., try one of these it's very usful. -83.129.37.252 16:29, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You can also refresh a page when you see the "Sorry" message. This will send your changes to the server again. You can refresh several times if you get the "Sorry" message repeatedly (this works for me just fine when I have to work with Wikipedia in IE). But the anon above is also correct—I do not know about Firefox as I do not use it, but Opera lets you go back to the edit screen without losing any changes.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 16:40, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)
Firefox does allow it. smoddy 20:34, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think the wecome message is already rather big. It should contain essentials. Otherwise, if we load it with messages, even fewer people will read it than do it now. :)
The sad truth is that the best way of learning things is by trial and errror; no amount of warnings is going to make you avoid pitfalls. Oleg Alexandrov 00:56, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Aside from the fact that the back/refresh method sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, and apart from the browser issue which doesn't address the newcomer aspect, I've been thinking about this. While I appreciate the advice, it wasn't about me needing help. I'm afraid Oleg Alexandrov is probably right. It could be considered a necessary hazing process. Weeds out the sissies. And even though I know about the problem, if I stay up too late and my eyes are starting to cross, I still forget and mess up. So, never mind. --Mothperson 13:02, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As a fellow newcomer, I find it faintly depressing that you describe a learning experience as hazing. All novelty can seem intimidating at first and mistakes may be common. But your response seems to betoken more of a drama queen than of a person robustly enduring pain to gain entry to the secret societies of the U.S. education system (not that this place is a combination of Greek letters anyway). -David91 13:19, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sorry. It was a joke. I know nothing about that Greek stuff. As for robustly enduring pain -huh? Anyway, pain is a great teacher. Misery is tenured. --Mothperson 13:48, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So, from one newcomer to another — WELCOME! -David91 13:53, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. I'm only a relative newcomer, having lost many many edits over the last few months. But bienvenue to you, too. --Mothperson 14:03, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
One other bit of advice that kept me from gnashing my teeth too much, before I upgraded to Firefox -- before clicking a Save/Preview button on a significant edit, click in the text box and do CTRL-A (Edit/Select All) and then a CTRL-C (Edit/Copy) [or whatever the equivalents are on your operating system/browser]. That way the entire text of the page is saved to your clipboard. If the save/preview takes, fine, keep editing and you'll eventually replace what's on the clipboard with something else. If not, and your text box blanks or loses your edits, you can just click in the text box again and do CTRL-V (Edit/Paste) to paste in your clipboard text with your edits intact. (Be careful doing this on a busy page, as you might inadvertantly overwrite someone else's edit if they submitted it after you copied the text.) — Catherine\talk 02:42, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I do this every time I press submit on a web page. Even with Firefox. It occasionally loses them, too, though it's generally good. - Omegatron 02:58, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguation policy change proposed

User:Lowellian has proposed a change in the policy on disambiguation pages which would eliminate the restriction on dab pages linking to articles which contain the word as only a part of their title. His main motivation is to remove the restriction on first-name articles such as Michael, in which he wants to have lists of everyone whose first name is Michael; but this change would be far-reaching, making dab pages into general index pages for Wikipedia.

Please register your comments on this change at the article's talk page. —Wahoofive (talk) 17:02, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Please do not put words into my mouth. You mischaracterize my main motivation. The proper notice above would have been just to direct users to that page, where users can read my arguments themselves instead of having you spin your interpretation of my arguments negatively here. —Lowellian (talk) 17:51, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)
To clarify, my main motivation is to stop edit wars over redirects on pages like Noam. —Lowellian (talk) 09:56, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Wiktionarizing, etc

Among the list of new articles, I frequently see would-be dictionary entries that have been marked with a template suggesting transwikiing [sp?] to Wiktionary. Often, these definitions are very terse and good.

It's not at all easy to write good dictionary definitions from scratch. I'd say that the huge majority of native speakers of a language are incapable of it, at least without a lot of practice. (And I'd include myself among this majority.)

So what's going on here? It could be that people are literate enough to be capable of this, and yet sufficiently obtuse/blinkered/obsessed not to have noticed that this is an encyclopedia and not a dictionary. Somehow I find this hard to believe. Much as I'd like to assume good faith (blah blah), I find it a lot easier to believe that these definitions have simply been plucked (plagiarized) from elsewhere.

I recommend that people think thrice before transwikiing anything that looks polished.

Am I "way out of line" here? -- Hoary 05:54, 2005 Jun 9 (UTC)

I'm sure that they already do think thrice, at least those who are familiar with the copyright violation problem (thanks for letting a few more know about it). I'm guessing from the way you handle the lingo you're not all that new here, so other than "continue to be vigilant", I'm not sure what you're suggesting.
For those who are new to all of this: experienced editors here are already suspicious of anything that appears out of whole cloth, as are the editors at Wiktionary. If you run across something that seems doubtful, especially an unwikified (unlinked) block of text that appears all at once, select and copy a substantial phrase and enter it into a full-text search engine such as Google, and see if the phrase appears on any other sites. If it does, check first that the page is not a Wikipedia mirror site that legally reuses our content -- they should give us credit somewhere on the page. If not, please list the page on Wikipedia:Copyright problems (shortcut: WP:CP or copyvio) and follow the instructions there. HTH — Catherine\talk 03:21, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the comment, Catherine. (I was starting to wonder if this was of interest to anybody other than myself.) I agree with most of what you say; however, it can be much harder to google for a terse dictionary definition than for, say, a passage about the career of a musician. Moreover, some (pretty good) dictionary definitions are so short that they could easily have been typed in from a printed or (non-web) electronic dictionary. Or of course copied and pasted from commercial software.
Rather than "continue to be vigilant", I'd suggest "encourage others to be more vigilant". I'll start by assuming that any terse, good, polished dicdef newly posted here (except of course as an introduction to something encyclopedic) is a copyvio, spend a few moments thinking of reasons why it might not be, and then, if I've found no reasons, recommend deletion. Uh-oh, but it wouldn't be "patent nonsense" and probably not posted to vandalize or disrupt (more likely, posted out of benign ignorance) so it wouldn't be classed as a speedy and on the contrary would have to be VfD'd. Aaargh: VfDs are so tiresome, at least when they don't have the unintended humor of (for example) overweening vanity defended by the subject/writer. But VfDs are The Way Of The Wiki; it's not for me to object. -- Hoary 04:00, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

American vs. British English titles

I'd like to propose a policy change regarding the use of American English vs. British English for certain article titles. I thought of this to prevented heated debates found on Talk:Petrol (gasoline), Talk:Yoghurt, and other such topics. It would affect articles that meet the following criteria:

  • The article has two or more accepted English terms or spellings, depending on the region.
  • The subject of the article is not primarily concerned with a particular country. For example, BBC is obviously more British than American, while television is country-neutral.
  • There is not a scientific international standard to use (as with aluminium and metre)
  • There is not a clear consensus on which term or spelling is more commonly-used.

The current precedent for such an article is to use the spelling of the original author. In my opinion, this is biased towards the United States, because the core Wikipedia user base started in that country, and thus most of the first articles were created by American authors.

Here's my idea for a less arbitrary solution: determine the two or three most common terms or spellings, and choose the article that comes first alphabetically. Since the English alphabet is consistent in its ordering, in all English-speaking countries, alphabetical is inherently neutral.

An example of articles that would be affected:

I came up with this proposal rather quickly, and may not have not thought it out completely. I'm quite interested in feedback on this idea. --Poiuyt Man talk 10:39, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As I'm sure that either (a) Aluminum redirects to Aluminium or (b) Aluminium redirects to Aluminum, I don't know what the problem is that you're trying to fix; although, yes, I concede that some spellings are ambiguous than others. Where is the dissatisfaction now? Oh, and if there were an article on Jail (there isn't), there could well be argument over whether gaol is also widely used; some Brit could insist that it's a widely used spelling, thus leading to a tiresome argument among people interested in such matters (I'm not) over whether it is or isn't, and thus whether Jail should redirect to Gaol. The idea of alphabetical precedence was amusing when I read it in Barth's The End of the Road a long time ago, but I don't think it belongs here.
Incidentally, this "American vs. British" business really can be a red herring, as (to choose one of your own examples) globalization certainly is an accepted spelling in Britain. (Offhand, I forget which they are, but some British dictionaries have long preferred ize to ise.) The creators of "dictionaries" (word lists) for computer spelling checkers have done their bit to create pseudo differences. -- Hoary 11:01, 2005 Jun 9 (UTC)
In the case of elements, like aluminium and sulfur, we use the IUPAC names (I would prefer sulphur; other would prefer aluminum; we use the international standard names and have redirects); in the case of SI units (metre; litre) we use the SI names (again, with redirects). We will both find gasoline and petrol at petrol (gasoline). What is the problem? -- ALoan (Talk) 11:11, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Those are not "SI names". SI includes the international rules for the usage of the symbols for units of measure. The rules for the spelled out names vary in different languages (e.g., chilogrammo in Italian, meter in Norwegian, meter or metre in English), and are outside the scope of the rules set by the CGPM, etc. Gene Nygaard 17:56, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I see, I was not aware of the standards for elements or measurements. The problem with Petrol (gasoline), Yoghurt, Color, and others is that there is no such scientific standard to name them by, so the only rule left to go by is the "original author" pseudo-policy, which many people don't agree with. Indeed, both Petrol and Gasoline redirect to the same article, but there is heavy debate over what the final redirected-to-article should be named, for neutrality. --Poiuyt Man talk 11:30, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The problem it is trying to solve is that some people get their panties/knickers in a knot over trivial naming issues. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:12, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
From the naive user's point of view, the issue is whether he or she can find the relevant page. In my part of the world, we live in flats and condos and private housing. Entering "flat" gets me musical notation and only thence to the disambiguation page. The condominium page is completely US-centric and completely irrelevant to my information needs. There is no entry for "private housing". So, the search on "flat" should take me directly to the disambiguation page and I should obviously write pages for "condo" and "private housing" which are a clear terms of art in my region. Now scale this up and we might be talking about many users whose legitimate local usages are not recognised and this, surely, should be the only test. The ability of the greatest number of users to find the material relevant to their needs should be the touchstone of this enterprise. -David91 12:17, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Firstly, you've omitted at least one additional criterion:
  • Neither/none of the potential titles is less ambiguous (without parenthetic elucidation) than the other(s). This was the justification for renaming Check (finance) to Cheque, and it also renders Apartment a more logical title than Flat (domicile).
Having said that, even with the above addendum, I disagree with your proposal.
I don't believe that we should establish a policy that would justify the otherwise pointless renaming of countless existing articles. The site's primary goal is to provide accurate, up-to-date information, and this policy would serve as a major disruption by...
  • ...distracting users from making meaningful contributions. (Instead of submitting actual content, some individuals would concentrate upon tracking down "mistitled" articles, many of which have been accepted for years.)
  • ...generating the inevitable conflicts that would arise as a result (arguments regarding which of the above criteria are met, the fairness of the policy, et cetera).
Also, to quote one of your remarks:
"The current precedent for such an article is to use the spelling of the original author. In my opinion, this is biased towards the United States, because the core Wikipedia user base started in that country, and thus most of the first articles were created by American authors."
1. While resulting from personal biases (not the NPOV-violating connotation), that's a disparity — not a bias in and of itself. The authors were American, and this is reflected in their work. (Keep in mind that these are situations in which no internationally preferable terms exist.) I'm not offended by British English (which is used exclusively by some Internet projects), and American English shouldn't offend users of British English, even if the AE:BE ratio isn't balanced.
2. New articles are written every day, in both British and American English. Perhaps the "original author" rule even serves (to some small extent) as incentive for people to write new articles, thereby locking in their preferred spelling/terminology if none of the aforementioned criteria apply. (Keep in mind that stubs don't count, so it isn't as though "dialect squatting" is a concern.)
Despite some isolated (albeit heated) debates, the current system seems to work fairly well, overall. I see no compelling need for a dramatic overhaul. —Lifeisunfair 13:45, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I concur with Lifeisunfair. As long as the appropriate dab links and redirects are in place, there's no reason to engage in a massive retitling of articles. Changing our current policy would result in countless hours of effort repairing and replacing wikilinks, plus hundreds of megabytes of unnecessary Talk page conflict. --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 14:26, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I disagree. The original policy works, except for a few cases where people choose to ignore it. (See Talk:Petrol (gasoline) or Talk:Petrol or Talk:Gasoline and petrol or whatever it is today.) Instead of coming up with new policies that entail renaming hundreds of articles, tons of fighting over whether this alphabetically earlier word is not a true alternative to this other word which is clearly superior blah blah blah, we should be making the current policies more obvious and more authoritative so people can't act like they don't apply or twist them in certain situations. "The policy only applies to the words in the article; not to the title itself" and other such nonsense. The policy exists to prevent us all wasting our time on pointless debates like this so we can spend our time contributing to articles instead. Who cares if there are more AE titles than BE?
Who cares??
If you think your country or nationality is underrepresented, write some more damn articles about it.
(This is not directed at anyone in particular; it is a rant.  :-) Don't accuse me of personal attacks.) - Omegatron 14:41, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)
The primary goal of the policy in this area should be to avert the vast waste of time that's occurred in such disputes. The way to do that is: (1) to have a general policy that resolves the AE/BE question (for article titles and for text); and (2) to follow that policy. We've already accomplished step 1. Our problem has been with step 2.
Your proposal is to replace one fairly arbitrary rule (first contributor) with another fairly arbitrary rule (alphabetical order). Your argument is that some people who disagree with the current policy will accept your replacement, and will therefore begin abiding by Wikipedia policy. I disagree, because:
  • Much of the refusal to follow the current policy comes from people who simply won't accept any use of the style they disfavor (except perhaps in articles relating to one specific country). If you look at the arguments that were made about the articles originally titled Yogurt and Gasoline, you'll see quite a few people referring to Google searches, or total number of speakers internationally, or use by international organizations, etc. Most of the people who follow their personal preferences in disregard of current policy would simply follow their personal preferences in disregard of your suggested replacement.
  • There might be some small number of people who will abide by a policy only if they consider it fair, who consider the current policy unfair, but who consider yours fair. As against that, some people who accept the current policy might consider your proposal unfair. ("It's biased toward BE because -ise always comes before -ize!" "It's biased toward AE because the U.S. has more regional dialects so the AE partisans have more chance of finding an applicable word early in the alphabet!" I'm not saying either of these arguments is sound, but then, I don't accept many of the arguments that have been slung around about Yogurt and Gasoline.)
  • Any small gain in compliance, because fewer people consider the policy unfair, would be offset, in terms of time saved, by the enormous effort of retrofitting articles on the basis of the new policy.
No policy will work to prevent such disputes unless it's applied. My solution is that we apply the current policy. Yogurt and Gasoline were started at those titles, so back they go, and any other examples of overzealous AE-to-BE or BE-to-AE changes also get reverted. JamesMLane 15:59, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Actually the current policy only applies "if all else fails". So, it should be reasonable to make arguments based on usage, etc., as long as there is some hope of moving towards consensus. Opposing attempts at discussion and defaulting immediately to the "if all else fails" position is not application of the current policy - what it amounts to is an admission of failure up front. Guettarda 16:14, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It may be reasoned that “failure up front” applies to usage of terms wherein both the US term and the UK term are each so highly used globally that any discussion on “most common term” will create exponentially increasing consternation among editors. I accept the Football (soccer) as the term football means something completely different in US English than it does in UK English, and general consensus would indicate that football is the more recognized term globally for the sport Americans call soccer. I do not accept Petrol (gasoline) as a permanent solution because it remains to indicate that the UK term is the preferred, or most common term, which remains highly debatable, and substantially divisive (as evidenced by Omegatron’s increasing use of profanity. An American may say he is cussing, a term immediately understandable to Americans, but not necessarily to an Englishman. An Englishman would consider it swearing—a term immediately understood by Americans, thereby making swear the acceptable term). Having said all that, I agree that some debate is necessary to establish this criterion.
Regarding the –ise/-ize spelling differences as opposed to the –or/-our spelling differences. The majority of international organizations that prefer UK spelling conventions do so with a notable exception of “-ize” (globalize, realize, but analyse). “-ize” spellings are, in fact, completely acceptable in Commonwealth English, although many English continue to use “-ise” spellings. ℬastique▼talk 16:43, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Aw, c'mon. Profanity is fun.  :-) For the record, I live in the U.S. and I always called it "swearing", and never heard "cussing" until fairly recently. I think that's a regional thing, not a Noah Webster thing. - Omegatron 21:15, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)
In response to Guettarda's point, I agree that some analysis of usage is proper. If the article had been started at Carfuel, because that term happens to be used in one country and the editor was from there, then Google hits and so on could establish that the title is no good. In the cases of Yogurt/Yoghurt and Gasoline/Petrol, though, it was quickly obvious that both versions were fairly common. In that circumstance, I don't think we should be trying to prove that one is somewhat more common than the other, which in praccticce is what happened. JamesMLane 08:54, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
User:Poiuytman, you are assuming facts not in evidence. It doesn't matter if "the English alphabet is consistent in its ordering, in all English-speaking countries," when the titles are not limited to the English alphabet. This is a growing problem, and will only get worse with the next version of the software for English Wikipedia.
For example, for Anders Jonas Ångström, where does Å come in the English alphabet? In the Swedish alphabet, it is the 25th letter, and Z the 28th. In the Norwegian alphabet, it is the 29th and last letter. In categories in the English Wikipedia, it also gets indexed somewhere after Z.
Most of the time, this will not be a problem in distinguishing American English or Australian English or British English. However, are there regional differences in English usage the following example? What about Æthelbert II of Kent? Note that Aethelbert II of Kent and Ethelbert II of Kent currently do not redirect to this article. Contrast Ethelbert of Kent which does redirect from Aethelbert of Kent but not from Æthelbert of Kent. Gene Nygaard 17:23, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You know what does need work, though? We need to clarify what "most common" means. As you saw in the Petrol discussion, "more common" can mean:

  • Greater number of google hits
  • Greater number of native English speakers
  • Greater number of overall English speakers
  • Greater number of humans who don't necessarily speak English but use derived words
  • Greater number of countries
  • Greater number of organizations
  • Greater number of links from Wikipedia itself

If someone wants to work on formulating guidelines or policy for which of these qualifies as "most common" and what qualifies as a valid reference for said information, that would be great and would help cut down debate. (Where is the "most commonly used" policy, anyway? I can't find it to quote...) - Omegatron 23:11, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

Without strong justification to change, is there really anything wrong with the current system? It may make some unhappy, but is it so bad that it needs changing? Just today, someone added some UK information to Truck stop including the UK name. I felt that deserved a redirect so that anyone using the UK name would get to the appropiate article and I added it. Doesn't this type of action work in most cases? Vegaswikian 23:29, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If my policy proposal is flawed and not likely to be accepted (which seems to be the majority opinion), then the current policy needs to be more prominent. In fact, is it even policy? I recently searched the Wikipedia: namespace for the text that states to use the original author's usage, and couldn't seem to find it. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) is all I can find relevant to the subject. This confuses me, because I clearly remember reading a more detailed explanation. If it is indeed missing, it needs to be added, either on the Manual of Style main page or Naming conventions.

Ignoring the alphabetical suggestion, and accepting that an arbitrary "last resort" solution is necessary, we still need to decide what other options must be exhausted before using the original author rule. Would a list of parameters, like those I originally suggested, be a viable way to do this? I also agree with Omegatron that "common usage" needs to be defined better --Poiuyt Man talk 09:44, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The pertinent policy (which applies to the entire text of an article, not merely its title) is located on the aforementioned Manual of Style page, in the section entitled National varieties of English. "If all else fails, consider following the spelling style preferred by the first major contributor (that is, not a stub) to the article."
Indeed, it appears as though that section is in need of expansion (to incorporate more of the criteria cited above).
As for determining the more/most "common" term/spelling, a number of benchmarks might be applicable, and I believe that these should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, a common sense approach (aided by general guidelines) is superior to specific codification. —Lifeisunfair 12:14, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It is a big problem. I had once wikified cable car and followed the link to aerial tramway. The former title is popular in India (and UK/Australia?), but the latter seems to be common in the US. What concerns me is that a person accessing wikipedia for the first time might think that an "aerial tramway" is the correct term for the same when the case is not be so. I also think that google hits is a flawed system of global popularity. AE will win hands down as there are more US sites than that from say India or South Africa which use BE derivatives. The only way out as far as I see would be for the title debate, is to have a merged content with both titles. That is to say, if I type Cable Car and if I type Aerial Tramway, I'm going to see the exact same content. [The system already exists for searching terms; the search ignores the case of the inputed text; while wikifying doesn't.]  =Nichalp (Talk)= 06:26, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Arbitration and Content Disputes

Requests for arbitration/RFC: The Arbitration Committee has put out a community request for feedback on ways to deal more effectively with content disputes. Many of the suggestions being discussed involve ways expert advice could be solicited to help Arbcom decide when writing is consistant with Wikipedia policies (e.g. NPOV, NOR, etc). Some suggestions include the potential creation of a content committee or editorial board.

See also, discussion on WikiEN-L: [7]

The ArbCom has already posted notices announcing this in a number of places, but I figured this board was another good spot for such a notice.

Dragons flight 15:05, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

background tint

Has someone changed the tint of the background on some pages? tommylommykins 16:47, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

A proposal for dealing with mass vandalism involving school system IP addresses

I've made a rough (very rough) draft of a proposal for a policy to deal with the problem of constant and large-scale vandalism by anon. users using the computers belonging to their school system to do so. This is the link: [8]. Praise, criticism, advice/comments, etc. would be greatly appreciated. Insults, vandalism, flames, etc. will be reverted. --Chanting Fox 04:37, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As some of you may have noticed, I've been cleaning out the external links sections of articles, especially the "high profile" pages tend to accrue lots of crud there. On a few articles (IP address, Weblog, BitTorrent, and Whois) I've met some resistance to this however, where a user wants to keep links that aren't informative but are instead to non-notable comedy pieces on the subject, op-ed pieces, discussion boards, online tools (like torrent search engines, WHOIS web interfaces, and "Find your IP address" sites), and even tld registries.

There was an objection that Wikipedia:External links was only a guideline and therefor the fact that the links were "quite useful" was sufficient reason for having them, however I feel (and was under the impression that consensus was that) external links should, like book references, be to informative sources and not to services, entertainment, etc.

  1. Where do people stand on the whole external links thing? Should it be strictly informative or will anything related do (or something in between)?
  2. Should Wikipedia:External links be made policy (it wasn't tagged as semi-policy/guideline until the beginning of april)?

Lastly, could people have a look at the external links on the pages mentioned above and mention their views on the talk pages of the articles? That way even if we don't get the larger policy matters settled at least we'll solve that dispute. --W(t) 15:07, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)

I'd welcome some clarification on this issue also. On the Homeschooling article there has been some reverting over the question of whether how-to sites are appropriate to link to.—Wahoofive (talk) 15:32, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
While some articles may suffer from excessive links, I think we should be cautious in establishing policy that encourages us to throw away potentially useful information. I often find that, on technical subjects, the Wikipedia treatment is (arguably correctly) too lightweight to be useful to an expert, but the external links remedy all flaws. While we don't want to turn into a Web directory, this is still a useful part of our mission. Bovlb 18:14, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)
I have been noticing more and more very low quality links, or links that have very little connection to the main topic of the Wikipedia article. I have also been noticing more and more spam (especially in Rambot-generated articles). Although I will delete inapropriate or unecessary links on the pages on my Watchlist (and will usually try to track down other recent edits from the same anon IP) I applaud W's more organized efforts at cleaning out the External links in Wikipedia articles. BlankVerse ∅ 15:02, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't think the External Link policy should be too strict. While obviously Wikipedia isn't a link farm, in most cases I think people add links they personally have found useful and informative. I myself have found that the links from Wikipedia are of a better quality than what you get by just using a search engine (because it's not so dependendentt on algorithms but more on real quality). If somebody believes a link to be inappropriate and want to delete, they should give a reason as to why this specific link is inappropriate as opposed to deleting external links on a general basis. --newsjunkie 10:10, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

All power to your elbow W - I do a fair bit of external link pruning and spam reverting myself. My basic rule of thumb is that if an external link looks like its of more benefit to the external site that it would be to Wikipedia's readers, then we probably don't need it. A good external link should have an explanation as to why it is useful.
However, it is possible to be over zealous. On older articles external links may actually be references to sources of information used in the article. -- Solipsist 10:58, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for informative external links, but external links should be informative. A history of blogging is informative and should be kept, someone's joke about bloggers shouldn't be. A description of the whois protocol is informative and should be kept, a web interface to whois isn't and should go. The example you mentioned on my talk page[9] is a very good one: Yes, by deleting most of the external links I near halved the article size, but it didn't become any less informative for it. The links I removed in no way explained what whois is or gave information about whois. In the end it boils down to Wikipedia is not a web directory, it's an encyclopædia with references and bibliographies. --W(t) 14:29, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)
Oh, and I'm not sure I agree with your benefit balance way of deciding. In my view, if an external link is useful to our readers, who cares how much good it's doing the site owner? As long as we stand to gain, the fact that it makes other people happy too shouldn't be a problem. --W(t) 14:29, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)
I suspect we are coming from the same direction, but I probably didn't express myself well enough. Most external links have some value (if not they are a no-brainer delete). Many readers trying to figure out what whois is, could well be tracing the owner of a domain name. In which case they are likely to find it useful if we include an external link to a whois search. The trouble is, in this case it is not clear that we should favour any particular whois search over any other and most (all?) are marketing tools for domain name registrars. Therefore most of those links are self promotional spam even though any one of them could be useful to some readers. -- Solipsist 18:31, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'd be interested in people's opinions of recent goings on at Atheism (and Talk:Atheism). As will be clear, my view is that it's a case of overzealous link-pruning (and, as newsjunkie referred to, on the first to occasions without proper explanation). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:24, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't know if the only consideration is how informative a link is, but also how useful it is. It could be a place where the user can act on what he just read and do a search for something to get more information for his/her personal situation, or it could be a discussion forum on whatever topic where the user can express his opinion on the subject or ask more detailed questions about it to get more information. While Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, I think it should also use the possibilities that the Internet offers through links and which a paper encyclopedia is less able to. And as for which search engine, I would either pick the one that already seems the most popular (determined place on result page), 3 or 4 of the most popular or the one you believe to be the most useful/easy to use. --newsjunkie 19:07, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In some cases that can be true. But remember we are here to build information as an encyclopedia, not to direct people to other web sites - that's the job of web directories like Yahoo. Links to discussion forums and blogs are seldom a good idea, unless the article is actually about that particular forum. newsjunkie, the links you've been adding to movie discussion forums, whilst I am sure they are well intentioned, could be viewed as spam linking. -- Solipsist 09:48, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Why are those links different than say the televisionwithoutpity linking from various TV sites? This forum is an in a sense a reincarnation of the Fametracker forums, run by the same people, (whose forums closed) but at the time was considered an "equal" forum to TWOP except with possibility to also discuss Movies, Books etc. in a similar kind of unique atmosphere. I don't see the harm in one at least one discussion link per entry (for example). I know from my own experience that it took a long time to find a good discussion site, and the web directories were no help at all. I don't think one can generalize about forums, because a lot of articles link to them and they do offer a way to perhaps get more information. Whereas Yahoo's/Google's goal is to list all possible links to a subject, here users can really add what they have found the most helpful. --newsjunkie 14:45, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Television without pity has actual structured content, apart from just an invitation to chatter. Mind you, it does editorialise rather strongly so in most cases I think there are better links to be used than TWOP. --W(t) 14:51, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

I know I'm getting off-topic here, just one more point: Fametracker also still has structured content, it's just that the forums have in a sense been outsourced to here, with new moderators but same idea. That's it. --newsjunkie 15:09, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I strongly believe that "comedy pieces" have a unique way of illuminating a topic, and that's why I insist on keeping them linked in the weblog article. Look at what comedy has done in driving home the points that the Iraq war was indeed a scam. Comedy just has a way of explaining topics from perspectives that are hard to cover in "straight" resources.

Further it's rather natural to include links to op-ed pieces. Gathering all points of view is critical to full understanding of topics, and obviously all POV's cannot be excruciatingly covered in the article proper. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Work 18:32, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

My personal experience is of finding the external links at IP address and Whois extremely useful. I believe that if you take all the links away the spammers think, ooh no competition, and immediately put their own link in on ot[s own, as happened at Wjois IP address and BitTorrent when Weyes removed the search engine links. Much better to have several competitors grouped together, which avoids spamming, and gives a balanced and therefore NPOV external links section, SqueakBox 19:05, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Spam filter

I tried to make an edit to Paint by numbers and the spam filter triggered on http pbn.homelinux.com/pbn/index.html, because homelinux.com is in the m:Spam blacklist. How can I get around this? This is a valid link. --Golbez 18:37, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Leave a message on the talk page for the blacklist on Meta; there are several admins there that maintain the list and will help tailor the block so that only the bad guys are punished. — Catherine\talk 13:24, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

1 large article or many smaller ones?

Basically I'm a noob and have noticed a tendancy to have many small articles, generally with much overlap, as opposed to a single large article on any subject. Is this just through people adding only a small amount to the database and perhaps not checking for any larger articles or a concious decision or defined style? Also in your opinion when is an article too large? Thanks --Spaully 22:51, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think some of it is that there's a certain feeling of achievement people get when they start a completely new article. My personal preference is to see the smaller articles merged into larger ones, so there's some feeling of context. I like the idea of having lots of information right there, rather than having to click through several related links to read a few extra sentences. Joyous 23:00, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
I'm probably also guilty of that, even though I do agree with you on this point. On an unrelated point what's the standpoint on removing stub tags without changing the article if you believe they were added incorrectly? --Spaully 23:07, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • I can tell you my view. I figure it this way: someone was bold and added the stub tag. I come across the article later and disagree, so I am bold remove it. If someone disagrees, we can talk about it. Or they can just put it back on. I try to keep in mind that "stub" really isn't intended to mark articles that aren't finished. No article is ever finished, and short articles aren't always stubs. I just look at it overall and try to decide if it feels stubby. Joyous 23:36, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
    • I agree. At some point a stub tends to no longer look like one. When that happens removing it makes sense, but keep in mind that this is a judgement call. I do tend to add a stub tag to small articles I create in the hope that it will suggest that it still needs a bit more to be able to stand on its own as an article. However, I'm not sure that really happens. Vegaswikian 23:49, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I have combined articles and split them. To me, it depends on the content. Some topics really need to be kept together since they can be difficult to follow on their own or they are so small they could be of greater value if put in one place. On the other hand, sometimes it makes sense to split out topics to make things clearer. So, as an example, if America West Holdings Corporation and US Airways Group Inc. merge, the airline articles will not be affected since they will continue to operate as is. However, one holding company will no longer exist and the other will get a new name and move to the home of the campany that no longer esists. Better to keep that out of the airline articles since it really does not affect them (yet). Vegaswikian 23:45, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • This query was based on the nephron article which I've been looking at today - you can see the various parts of the nephron are currently split into separate articles. IMO it makes sense to combine all of these and have redirects but was concerned I might be treading on peoples toes, esp. with the Loop of Henle article. When I get time..--Spaully 00:02, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Hm...nephron is a pretty iffy case. You might try bringing your suggestion up on the talk pages of the articles involved to see if there is any objection or further comment. If you're concerned that the descriptions are too brief on nephron, you could add a bit more material there, but (IMHO) this is probably not an ideal candidate for merging. --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 00:15, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In addition to the sense of accomplishment, I suspect that many new Wikipedians aren't familiar with the proper way to set up a redirect, so they create stubs under many related titles and interlink the articles in the body text. I strongly favour merging articles that are very stubby (and likely to remain that way)—it cuts down on duplication, plus it means that the information can be seen within a larger context. If you see a tiny fragment of an article that looks like it belongs elsewhere, be bold. Merge the content to another article, and create a redirect to the new location. The other thing about merging is that it is a reversible process. If enough content is added, then sections can always be broken out back to smaller sub-articles. --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 00:10, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Exoskeleton is an article that I believed should be split into two articles: one "exoskeleton" for natural ones, the other "exoskeleton (artificial)" for man-made ones. People did not like this idea. I still believe two-articles-in-one is a bad idea with this case.

In contrast, many other articles such as film, TV, book characters, could use some merger unless they do have a life of their own. This is usually not the case in Wikipedia. -- Toytoy 12:34, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Unusual transclusion issue not covered by policy

There's something going on over at the articles relating to the 2005 English cricket season that I'm not sure is kosher, but which doesn't seem to be covered by any policies or policy proposals I've been able to find. A large number of small pages have been created detailing the events of individual cricket matches (for example, 2005 English cricket season/Middlesex v Worcestershire 1 May 2005) and then each of these small articles is transcluded into a number of very large articles that group them based on various criteria (the example linked above is transcluded into Worcestershire County Cricket Club in 2005, Middlesex County Cricket Club in 2005, National League Division One in 2005 and 2005 English cricket season (1-14 May)). Anyone know of any policies I might have missed (I've seen the stuff at Wikipedia:Transclusion), or have any opinions on what the policy on this sort of thing should be? Note that the fact that these cricket match subarticles are IMO in violation of Wikipedia:Subpages policy is a separate issue, at some point I'll be moving them all to non-subpage titles to correct this. I figured I should see what people thought of the transclusion issue first, though. Bryan 05:15, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's not cricket! (sorry) I believe the general feeling is that transclusion to generate article content is a Very Bad Thing, and should be avoided if at all possible. --Carnildo 07:35, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think you've hit the nail on the head with your last clause, which I agree with. It should be avoided if possible. First I invite you to look at 2005 English cricket season (which is a work in progress) and all the related articles to see what we're doing, which is adding comprehensive encyclopaedic information about the season. It takes up a lot of time and a lot of maintaining - but it is dealing with the season from a wide range of perspectives which is just not offered by any other site or publication. It would be impossible to have such comprehensive coverage without transclusion (it would just take so many more hours to put together and maintain as to make it impossible). So here we have a choice between no articles and articles with transclusion - and that's an easy choice to make.

I totally agree that we should not, however, use transclusion willy-nilly. It is only on a very very small number of articles where there would be benefits. On those articles we should accept it because WP will benefit from those articles. In essence I'm saying that the guideline of "no transclusion", like all our guidelines, is not a law writ in stone, jguk 10:43, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How about substituting it when the transclusion is no longer necessary? I don't think anything would be lost if the reports were subst'd in now. smoddy 10:47, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I have no opposition against subst'd when it is no longer necessary - but I think that would be, in this case, towards the end of October, once the season is complete and there is time for a full copy-edit and proof-read and an opportunity to put everything in proper context. Otherwise we'd be in the silly position of having to locate and edit four articles each time we find one typo. Kind regards, jguk 11:41, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#transcluding_prose.--Patrick 12:37, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ah, thanks, this isn't a policy but it's certainly very relevant. :) Bryan 19:10, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Forget transclusion and subpages! When the hell did individual team matchs in regular season sports become encyclopedic and worth separate articles? Are we headed towards individual articles on each of the 84 games/season times however many teams are in the NBA, every year, let alone, NFL, NHL, MISL, MLB, Indian cricket, Australian rugby, CFL, Brazilian soccer, etc., etc., etc.? Is there something really that special about English cricket that is escaping me??? Niteowlneils 05:07, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Seriously! Did Wikipedia become a sports news website when I wasn't looking? Can we send this kind of material to Wikinews? They could use content, and we really don't need this. Isomorphic 05:14, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
They're not separate articles: they're constituent parts of articles that, because they are used in various places (e.g. a match account for Durham v. Essex would be mentioned in Frizzell County Championship Division Two in 2005, Durham County Cricket Club in 2005 and Essex County Cricket Club in 2005) and using transclusion makes the whole thing possible. I think both of you should be able to see that these will be useful and encyclopaedic articles -- for example, I might be looking for information on the 2005 English cricket season in a few years time, and Wikipedia will then be offering precisely the complete information I am searching for. --Ngb 14:32, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We don't need this is a terribly poor argument when we've got an encyclopedia with - theoretically - unlimited space. People are interested in this, and if others want to write on MLB, MLS etc. - let them. What's the point in deleting potentially useful information for the sake of it? Sam Vimes 19:05, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
we don't have unlimted space. The developers do wounderful things with compressing history and such but we do not have unlimited space.Geni 16:04, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I understand that "Wikipedia is not paper", but hard disk space and bandwith are not free. I don't see how the details of regular season sports matches can be considered encyclopedic in stand-alone articles or season summaries. No encyclopedia in the past has included them, and even Almanacs, which offer more detailed coverage of a given year, limit themselves to final standings, playoffs, and the championship. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not states "Wikipedia should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories (however, our sister project Wikinews does exactly that). Wikipedia does have many encyclopedia articles on topics of historical significance that are currently in the news, and can be significantly more up-to-date than most reference sources since we can incorporate new developments and facts as they are made known."--I don't see how regular season matches have any inherent 'historical significance'. FWIW, [[{team name} in {year}]] articles don't seem encyclopedic, nor supported by precedent over the past 4 years of Wikipedia, to me, either. Niteowlneils 19:27, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I just want to comment on two particularly jarring things you've said. 'No encyclopedia in the past has included them' is a *terrible* argument for deciding on Wikipedia content, as no encyclopedia in the past has been like Wikipedia and there are probably gigabytes of content that no encyclopedia in the world has ever included. Secondly, 'even Almanacs [don't cover individual matches]'. I'm afraid I can only assume that sports almanacs have a fundamental difference between the US and the UK. The leading almanac for cricket, the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, includes *full details of every single first-class and List A cricket match* and has done for over a hundred years.
So I don't think these are questions we should be asking. What we should be saying is 'is this content informative and potentially useful?'. I submit that, indeed, it is. --Ngb 22:11, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, I should have prefaced both with 'general interest', which I understand Wikipedia to be, a 'general interest encyclopedia'--Wikipedia is not a 'cricket almanac', nor a 'cricket encyclopedia', nor even broader "sport" almanac or encyclopedia. And general "World Almanac"s have summaries of regular seasons, not week by week results. Regular season sports play-by-play is 'current events', not repeated, so is better suited to WikiNews or WikiCities, whereas TV episodes (which I'm not defending as necessarily encyclopedic either, but I find more so than articles about fictional characters, places, and things) get repeated over and over into posterity, more like documenting a book, not a news item.
Also, not every fact that someone in the future 'may want to look up' or 'may find interesting/useful' is encyclopedic. Are you saying we should report every fact that appears in every local police blotter? Movie times listings? Wedding/anniversary announcements? Every death? Every single birth? How about pre-season games? Little league game play-by-play? TV/movie audition results? Every write-in candidate for sewer district councilmember? Everything from the 'business people on the move' columns appearing in most daily newspapers?
How about you write all contributors to the last fund-raising drive and tell them their $50,000 of hardware is going to be keeping daily sports scores for eternity, and see how many want their money back, as I believe that goes WAY beyond most people's idea of the scope of an encyclopedia. And, again, I don't see how regular season matches have any inherent 'historical significance'. Niteowlneils 03:23, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
How about we write to them and tell them that their $50,000 of hardware is going to be keeping extensive details of every single Doctor Who episode? Or biographies of every character in The Simpsons? Or lengthy accounts of every Pokémon? I don't see why the match-by-match reviews of the season that we are developing for English cricket are any less encyclopaedic than any of that content. When these reviews of the season develop I think Wikipedia will be providing useful, informational content that people simply can't get elsewhere.
I think some of the examples in your list of facts are a little facetious, to be honest. I'm sure you can see the difference between match details in the context of an article on '$Sports-team in $year' and movie times for today, for instance. --Ngb 08:32, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So, maybe a couple were over the top--what about the rest. My personal opinion is that Wikipedia's fiction coverage is excessive, and probably should have been confined to a 'sister project' from day one. However, fiction has been included since day one, so people knew what they were supporting. My main concern is that starting now to include play-by-play results of regular season sport matches is a MAJOR, undiscussed, expansion of Wikipedia's scope by a small number of contributors, beyond what I would expect in an encyclopedia. Niteowlneils 15:23, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I quote, from WP:NOT: "This (the fact that Wikipedia is not paper) means that there is no practical limit to number of topics we can cover other than verifiability and the other points presented on this page." As this is evidently useful enough knowledge that it gets printed in a cricketers' almanack which thousands buy every year - a book people keep - I don't think this falls under "news reports", but is encyclopedic and worth keeping for the future. Cheers for correcting typos, btw. Sam Vimes 20:06, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yup, just because we have infinite space doesn't mean we should try to be the be-all end-all information repository. And once we're done with [[{team name} in {year}]] we should go for [[{Television series} episodes in {season}]]. --W(t) 19:37, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)

Theoretical 'infinite space', and bought and paid for hard disk space and servers to meet the demand to get the content out, are quite different things. I don't have infinite funds to finance documenting every microscopic detail of daily life worldwide; do you? Niteowlneils 03:23, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Well, good luck on getting List of Star Trek: TOS episodes deleted, then. Not to mention the page-long plot summaries of each episode. Or the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix. AFAICS, that's never been put up for deletion - and an individual Star Trek episode is IMO just as newsworthy as an individual soccer or cricket match. Sam Vimes 20:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Or every Simpsons episode. How is a cricket match less important than a Simpsons episode? And you think that almanacs don't contain reports of every match? Then you clearly know nothing about cricket almanacs. I think these pages are wholly encyclopedic. Why shouldn't we have articles on every team's season in the NFL or NHL? Seems entirely reasonable to me. I would not even contemplate reading them, but they are fully worth having. smoddy 20:45, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
On the other hand, none of those television episode articles are transcluded into other pages. Personally, I think we should just be linking to these; instead of making Durham County Cricket Club in 2005 (for example) into a monster huge page containing everything there is to know about the season, make it into a summary of the season with a list of links to the individual game articles for those who want more detailed information. This is how it's done everywhere else on Wikipedia where there's comparable information. Bryan 22:15, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
They are a long term project. In the long term, they will not be transcluded, but substituted. What is your argument? That an article about Durham's progress in 2005 should be a bunch of links? This is a work-in-progress. At the end of the season, it will be an excellent resource. It is a little unattractive at the moment, but not as unattractive as your idea. The match summaries are summaries. It would not be ideal to cut the text down any further. What is your problem with these articles? That you don't want to read them? "No other article does this" is not a valid argument. Why is this bad? Who does it confuse? A simple explanatory note could easily be inserted if you are worried about new users being confused. In short term, it is less than perfect. In the long term, it will work out fine. smoddy 22:36, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
No, my argument is (as I said explicitly above) that the Durham's progress article should be a summary and a bunch of links. It already has a three-paragraph summary at the top of that article along with an infobox listing players. Using substitution in the long term isn't as good as linking, IMO, because if people spot errors or omissions in those game summaries they'll have to go to multiple different places to edit them all (this bit I mentioned at Wikipedia talk:Template namespace#A random note, unfortunately I didn't know about this discussion when I first posted here so it's wound up being talked about in multiple places). There's no need to trim any information out of Wikipedia as a whole, indeed I think linking to the individual game pages instead of transcluding them would make it easier to make them grow even larger. Bryan 23:18, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Here's a quick and dirty example of what I mean. This is simply the existing Durham article with the transcludes turned into links: User:Bryan Derksen/Sandbox (the tables might be okay to subst: in, those aren't likely to be edited again once the season's finished). Bryan 23:27, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am sorry if I misenterpreted your argument. A bunch of links becomes a list. A list becomes a category. A category is useless. These articles will all become excellent articles in their own right, but the individual matches are unlikely to. We don't need to be immediatist. The articles will evolve, over time, into effective summary articles for each club and division. A bunch of links will totally wreck this article structure, which allows for development that will result in good summary articles after time. No-one would read a set of links. This excellent method allows editors to complete very encyclopedic articles, while still giving the reader something to read. Idealistic notions of no transclusion and no subpages are good in the long term, but use to the reader is paramount in the short term. smoddy 23:30, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
"A category is useless" is a POV that's far from universally held, and in any event a category can coexist perfectly well with both lists and summary articles. Subst:ing the match articles into all the pages that currently transclude them isn't a good long-term solution either, though; you didn't address the problem I pointed out about how keeping them consistent would require future editors to find all of the multiple instances to fix. Bryan 23:45, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Which is the point of validating them carefully before subst-ing them in. The thing is that each article will, in time, take a different spin on the matter than the others, even if they originally incorporate the same text. I anticipate the chunks of text being a common starting point, that can be worked together into a coherent article at the end of the season. This is why I don't believe a list as you propose would be appropriate. As for the use of categories, I am a firm believer in them. However, I meant that they would be useless here. But categories are beside the point; I apologies for introducing them. Anyway, I'm off to bed now. I'll continue wrangling with the issue in the morning. smoddy 23:55, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
My response to your sandbox would be a) that it looks nice. b) That no-one will read the articles. I personally don't consider the individual matches encyclopedic. Their inclusion in all four places is encyclopedic. Therefore, they are served best in the article. Else this becomes a news source. smoddy 23:34, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We can expand the summary section, though - based on the "match details" which are linked to. Plus, no encyclopedia (at least, no self-respecting one) would repeat the same content in four different pages. It's perhaps a bit more work for the people working on the project, though, but I think it makes it look more professional. Sam Vimes 08:59, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We don't intend, long term, to have the same text on all four pages. We intend to have different takes based around the same events and same original text on all four pages. In the short term, it doesn't look great. In the long term, it will work fine. What is wrong with this temporary solution? smoddy 09:54, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
One problem with such temporary solutions that go against accepted M.O. is that when they are done once, they will forever be cited as precedent for ever-expanding uses, many of which are not likely to be temporary or well thought out. We will see talk pages filled with "What we are doing with Foo really very different from what was done with Cricket articles," the next expansion citing Foo as precedent. The situation with fiction should be an object lesson. --Tabor 17:00, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Self-definitions and description of beliefs and POVs

I understand that the generally accepted policy is that any group, organization, theory, or movement should have their POV and their beliefs described from their POV in the first place in neutral language, even if these beliefs are untrue, bizarre or morally offensive. But what if a group is described with a term that is not a self-definition? For example, "apostates". Very few former believers call themselves apostates, probably because the word has a somewhat negative connotation. Should the article on apostasy in the first place describe the POVs, criticisms of apostates? There are of course quite a number of other articles that have comparable issues. (FYI, I am an apostate in the technical sense of the word, a former believer who has become a vocal critic of his faith.) Andries 15:17, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't believe you're right that this is the generally accepted policy. For instance, the Jesus article begins with a lengthy discussion on whether he existed or not (although Christians clearly believe that he does exist) and then devotes more time to the Muslim and Jewish views on Jesus than to the Christian view on him, jguk 15:38, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Christians may believe he existed, but the point would be "did jesus believe he existed". Obviously, if he did he did and if he didn't he didn't. Now the Christian page leads with how christians self-identify. --W(t) 17:16, 2005 Jun 11 (UTC)
Did Jesus believe he existed? I'm pretty sure cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) wasn't part of the Sermon on the Mount, but I think he did answer "I am" when asked if he was the Messiah (Mark 14:62). I'm not exactly sure to what change you would like to see; clarify please? Essjay · talk 14:55, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
  • IIRC, terms like apostacy and heresy etc are usually used in relation to something else - views something that some religious group considers offensive, inaccurate, against the scripture and so on. So, unless someone is vocal self-described "heretic", they should not be specified as such. However, if some religious group describes some splinter or sect or rebellious member of their faith as heretics, they often have specified why they think so and those views could be included in the article as their POV. - Skysmith 11:17, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Please take a look at Wikipedia talk:Deletion process#Links to a deleted page: When to remove. Thx. mikka (t) 16:56, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

NPOV tags

Is there any rule that states an {{NPOV}} tag may be removed if tagger fails to post reasons on the talk page before a certain amount of time? I've just noted that street prostitution has had this tag for about 3½ months, but the talk page does not mention why the tag was placed. If there is no such rule, shouldn't there be one? It makes no sense for editors to see an article isn't NPOV without knowing how it could be improved, not to mention it leaves a bad impression on readers if the claim is false. --Pidgeot (t) (c) (e) 01:04, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't know if there's a rule about it, but when I come across a case like this I ask about it on the article's talk page and then if nobody responds within a few week's time I assume the issue's been forgotten by anyone it was important to and remove the tag. Nobody's complained about me doing this yet, though since I'm specifically picking articles nobody seems to be paying attention to I guess that's not surprising. I sometimes dig up the user who put the tag there and post a question on their user talk: page, if their user contributions indicate that they're still active on Wikipedia. Bryan 01:24, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Actually, yes there is a rule about it. Wikipedia:NPOV dispute says: you need to at least leave a note on the article's talk page describing what you consider unacceptable about the article. Gentgeen 01:53, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Should the same apply to apply to "cleanup tags". Been noticing several articles with cleanup tags and a "red" tab for the talk page. If someone thinks an article needs a cleanup tag then he should have the courtesy to explain why. --Ron Ritzman 22:37, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Most articles that are tagged for cleanup (usually on RC patrol) don't need the tag explained. If you don't understand why an article was tagged, there's always the tagging user's talk page. --W(t) 22:43, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)
Still, the guidelines on tagging an article for cleanup do say When adding an article, include a brief reason why you are putting it there. Try to keep your comments short, but also keep them specific. Saying an article "needs work" is completely uninformative.--Ron Ritzman 01:21, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
That's for listing articles on the cleanup page, which is usually for some more structural cleanup as opposed to things the cleanup tag gets slapped on. Different tools for different purposes. --W(t) 01:25, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)

Privacy Policy

Do we have a policy on keeping some information about living people private? I seem to recall there was a discussion once when some people posted the name of a rape victim in an article about the crime. I also remember there was a discussion when somebody posted what was allegedly Bill Gates' social security number in the article about him. I wrote an article about A. J. Quinnell in which I intentionally did not mention his real name because he has gone to some lengths to keep that out of public knowlege. There is also a case about an adult film actress who uses a pseudonym in all her public appearances but keeps her real legal name private. In that particular case, the actress posted here that she has been a target of stalkers and requested to have her birthname removed from the article about her.

So do we have a policy about handling situations like this? MK2 04:36, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The closest we've got is Wikipedia:verifiability. The general consensus is that, if a piece of information is well-enough known to be verified, adding it to Wikipedia won't cause any additional harm. --Carnildo 05:01, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'd argue that such information isn't particularly encyclopedic anyway. Take Quinnell. The article already tells a bit about his life; there's more personal detail there than I put in Mike Resnick, and Resnick is far from being secluded and anonymous. How would knowing Quinnel's real name help a reader's understanding of him? It's just a label, and one that isn't used in the context in which the man is encyclopedic. Ditto a porn star; why does the reader need her real name, if that's not the name she's notable under? In such cases, I think we can allow these people their privacy without compromising our purpose as an encyclopedia. Isomorphic 05:08, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • I agree with Isomorphic. Mgm|(talk) 15:05, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)
  • Just for balance, I'm going to agree with Carnildo, as long as it's verifiable and relevant, by all means include it. Just because something's "Just a label" isn't a reason not to include it. Mustela putorius furo is just a label too, but it's still worth mentioning in Ferret. Labels are the hatracks for further information. Even if the person is a nobody (and this hatrack only has one hat on it), other facts may be added later, or readers may find other facts from other sources that apply to the label in question. (Yes, finding hats in separate places that are on the same hatrack screws up the analogy, but think of it as a transdimensional hatrack). --W(t) 15:15, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)
  • I also agree with Carnildo. Neutralitytalk 04:36, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
    • In general, I agree with the idea that most information should be included. But I sometimes find myself uncomfortable with some specific cases. As a random example, would it be appropriate to start an article on "Paris Hilton's hacked cell-phone" and include all the personal phone numbers that were posted on the internet? It could be argued that most of the people involved were public figures but are their phone numbers public information? Does posting this information serve any real encyclopediacal purpose or is it just posting gossip? MK2 05:21, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
      • It's not gossip, everything we post should be verifiable (if only in that "person said that something). --W(t) 14:26, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)
      • In that specific case, I would be inclined to argue that the numbers were a)primary source material and unsuited to Wikipedia; and b)too much granular detail for the article anyway. Although everything that goes into Wikipedia should be verifiable, it doesn't follow that every verifiable fact should go into Wikipedia. More generally, I think that Wikipedia should with very few exceptions (I can't think of any off the top of my head, but there are probably one or two) avoid reproducing any phone numbers or email addresses. We're not the Yellow Pages, and all we're really doing is exposing the owners of the numbers/email addresses to harrassment or spam. --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:25, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • The very similar question arose on Perverted-Justice.com. The proprietor of that website uses a pseudonym. An opposing website had published his name and some editors wanted to add it here. However we decided that the information was not verifiable. Later, a newspaper published the man's real name and we added it since it was now verifiable. (An extenuating circumstance is that the PervertedJustice website specializes in uncovering people's identities, so it seemed especially odd to keep its owner's name a secret.) I think the editors involved handled it properly. -Willmcw 20:10, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
    • We seem to be discussing different issues. Presumedly, all the information that is posted here is 'verifiable' - and if it isn't it should be deleted for reasons having nothing to do with this discussion. And there's an issue about whether information is relevant - as I recall that was one of the points made in the discussion on posting Bill Gates' Social Security Number; nobody disputed it was his actual number but several people argued that it was trivia that conveyed no real information. What I'm interested in is whether we should establish a new test for inclusion; is an item of information public or private? Obviously, almost all information is public to some degree or another. But that doesn't mean we seek to spread it about as widely as possible. You'll notice, for example, how few contributors to this site include their real name, home address, and telephone number on their user page.
    • Newspapers have a policy of not publicizing the names of victims of sexual crimes. The idea is that the privacy of the victim is greater than the newsworthiness of the information. I'm suggesting we should at least consider creating a similar policy; to consider adopting a standard that in some cases the subject has the right to keep some information about themselves private that we should respect. MK2 05:22, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Merging, redirection, and the GFDL

The GFDL requires that we preserve the histories of pages. Which means that if we merge and redirect something, we have to keep the history around as long as the page the content it was merged into remains, which generally means keeping the redirect. Sometimes this is OK; we want to keep a useful redirect anyway. Sometimes the redirect is all but useless. Maybe it just begs for deletion, and maybe someone isn't too careful about indicating when content was merged; the redirect gets nuked along with the history. (Sometimes I'll move a page to a better title before merging to discourage others from wanting to delete a useless redirect.)

So, an idea: why not move all pages that turn into redirects after a content merge to a subpage of the page it was merged to, and note on the Talk page what the merged subpages are? If the redirect was actually a useful one, the redirect left behind after the move can be changed to point to the target page, and if it wasn't, it can be safely deleted post-move. (This solves the "you can't vote to merge and delete" problem, too.)

Example: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of biomedical topics, A to E, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of biomedical topics, F to J, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of biomedical topics, K to O, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of biomedical topics, P to T, and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of biomedical topics, U to Z. Every single keep vote on these involves keeping to preserve history; there is no other reason for the pages to remain. Under this procedure the page structure would then become Targetpage/merged/sourcepage1, Targetpage/merged/sourcepage2, and so on, with the source pages not cluttering up the main namespace and their location giving a clear indication of why they still exist. Does it create additional work at the point of merging? Yes. It it easier than figuring out if a redirect not explicitly tagged has history that needs to be preserved? Also yes. This improves our compliance with the GFDL; complete authorship information becomes easier to find. Particularly, are there any good arguments *against* doing this for someone motivated to do so? What could achieve the same result in fewer steps? (As a side note, I am responsible only for minor tweaks to this idea, but no one else wants to post it....) Mindspillage (spill yours?) 06:50, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Keeping the redirect does have a very important benefit. It stops us from breaking any external links to those pages. Given there is no downside to keeping the redirects, these small benefits are sufficient to keep them. Pcb21| Pete 09:33, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, redirects make sure external links don't go dead, but sometimes the names of such pages don't make sense as redirect titles. I like the idea Mindspillage suggested. It preserves edit histories of merged pages, but doesn't clutter with useless redirects in the main name space. Mgm|(talk) 15:08, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)
    • How are they "clutter"? If they really are useless then they are unseen and do nothing. If a redirect doesn't make sense, why we are moving the content from one to the other in the first place? Pcb21| Pete 15:53, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
      • They may not even point to the appropriate article. If I write a wonderful article on Ferrets and their habitats at Gibbon habitats, and it gets merged into Ferret, it would be bad to have to redirect Gibbon habitats to Ferret for all eternity. This seems like a wonderful plan Mindspillage. --W(t) 17:58, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)

Personal attacks

I was wondering what actualy constitutes a "personal attack" under the Wikipedia:No personal attacks policy. Does "Go screw yourself" constitutes a personal attack? Something of a revert war is underway on User:Coolcat's Talk page, between him and his nemeses, User:Stereotek and User:Davenbelle. They have been reverting that comment as a personal attack. I have seen this go on for several days. I looked at the policy, and it does not seem like a "letter of the law" personal attack. If this constitutes a personal attack, then by all means it should be removed. But if not it seems to constitute harrassment. I'm curious what people think about this issue - regardless of what they think about the bigger issues surrounding these editors. Guettarda 04:57, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This is definitely a personal attack, but it's not a very strong one. In the middle of an ongoing argument, removing other's text, even if the text isn't very nice, might be considered rude and inflame the situation. I'd suggest the contributors forget about this comment until after a consensus is reached regarding the issue, and then the argument can be appropriate edited or even summarized. This is just my own opinion, however. Deco 05:33, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It's not part of a discussion. Coolcat has a large section on his talk page with material he has written, not as part of a discussion but his thoughts on various matters (material which normally is placed on the user page). See User talk:Coolcat#Personal thoughts and frame of mind. — Knowledge Seeker দ 06:10, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I beleive you are serious about asking the question, but frankly my initial reaction was that the question was silly. Of course it's a personal attack, and I would cite the NPA example of profanity as appropriate category. Not as bad as any number of other things that could be said, but statements like "go screw yourself", "fuck off", etc, clearly express a derogatory opinion of the other individual and hence are inherently personal. Dragons flight 05:44, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks. I didn't intend the question to be silly. It was too mild a term to register as "profanity" with me (though, on reflection I suppose you are correct in that characterisation). Guettarda 11:54, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Personal attacks are unacceptable, but note that that doesn't mean you should remove them. We established that at Wikipedia talk:Remove personal attacks/Archive -- Tim Starling 13:25, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
I took a look at that vote and I don't see a clear decision. 10 voted "Let's do it", 9 voted "Let's try it" (which seems like a provisional "yes"), 17 voted "Let's not do this", and 2 voted "Other/undecided". What I can't find is where anyone summarized the results and posited a conclusion. Did the editors involved decide the "Try" votes were equivalent to "No" votes? -Willmcw 20:30, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
A 50/50 split is usually counted as a "keep the status quo" vote. --Carnildo 21:37, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Not factoring personal attacks is the status quo? I thought it the other way around. -Willmcw 23:02, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
I think the status quo is that people can do whichever their personal preference is, since there was no consensus on either side. --Dmcdevit 23:07, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks. Sometimes these surveys aren't so clear, especially to someone newly looking at them. Cheers, -Willmcw 23:43, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedian blacklists?

Some Polish Wikipedians have created a Black Book to record (name and shame?) the names and actions of editors who they perceive to have engaged in anti-Polish behaviour. Currently there is one name on the list.

The article has been VfD'd. Is this type of page appropriate for Wikipedia? Is it helpful or hurtful to dispute resolution? Is it even permitted under WP:NPA?

My own take on it is that this sort of page would encourage witch hunts, polarize debates, and rapidly escalate to formal and unpleasant dispute resolution procedures—there are very few more rapid and effective ways to irritate most people than to publicly declare them to be bigoted. Then again, I could be totally wrong. Input from seasoned editors strongly encouraged. --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:41, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As it has been created less then 24h, it is hard to judge it's long term impact. As one of the Polish editors here, I have seen several times various users - including experienced contributors and admins - use and repeat arguments like 'Polish sources cannot be trusted because they are Polish' or 'this is wrong beacuse it is Polish nationalistic POV, EOT'. While it is rare, it happens, and it has been happening for some time (see meta:How to deal with Poles and check dates). I would be the first person to oppose and VfD a project designed to encourage personal attack, witch hunt, kangaroo court, etc. However this is no different from RfC/RfA except it is limited in scope, and designed to ease the burden on those pages. Also this is an attempt to try to resolve such disputes before they are more public and to educate users that they should avoid offending other users due to their nationality (be it Polish or any other). I think that collection of such stereotypish arguments and responces to them would be useful. Note also that this page simply collects existing quotes - it does not create the offending material. True, some people may feel offended when included on that list, but as is written on the page, if somebody is falsly accused, we will apologise - but we would like the same courtesy in return. As much as Wiki is a friendly enviroment, when dispute arises, I see that it ends much more often with one side giving up and dissapearing then with one side apologising. And in those few cases where in fact some editors are 'bigoted', I think we try to make them see the error of their ways. If this page shames a few users and makes them apologise and in future think twice and check sources instead of relying on personal attacks, I feel it will be for the best for our entire community. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 19:04, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia pages as Published Subject Indicators

OASIS is developing a concept called a Published Subject Indicator, which is essentially a Web page plus a certificate from the publisher of the page that the page is about something. For example, the page Apple is about apples, and could be used as a subject indicator to indicate that some topic map is concerned with apples.

The formal requirement for achieving this is very simple: simply add a line of boilerplate to the displayed version of each page saying "Wikipedia intends that this page be a Published Subject Indicator with URI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever." That states the publisher, the intent to create a Published Subject Indicator, and the URI corresponding to it.

This would not significantly increase storage requirements, since it is boilerplate, and any effects on bandwidth would probably be lost in the noise.

Comments?

--John Cowan 22:02, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

  • My first reaction is kind of who cares what they want. Does this mean that they want everyone with avaialble information to conform to their requirement? Wikipedia already has a clear definition of how this data can be used and it already is copied to many other sites. If we were to do something special for this one site, what happens with the second one? Or the 100th one? I see no reason to do anything in this case. They know how to get information from wikipedia already since we have gone on record with directions. They need to use the systems that are already in place. Vegaswikian 22:25, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • To clear up an apparent misunderstanding: this isn't about reusing Wikipedia content, it's about Wikipedia standing behind its URLs. It's already common for people to point to Wikipedia pages as references in human-readable documents; making them published subject indicators formalizes this use and extends it to machine-understandable documents as well. (That doesn't mean the URL can't be changed when there's a clear reason to do so.) The copies of Wikipedia content wouldn't in any way be affected, since they are at different URLs altogether. --John Cowan 13:52, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)
      • Doesn't Wiki already stand behind its URLs? The issue was adding something to the boilerplate on every page, which I contend is not needed. Part of the new concept is using XML tagging if I understand a little about the concept. Wiki has already done this with the categories that are in the articles. These are better indicators for a subject indicator than something on every page. In fact articles without a category probably are not the best choices for a project like OASIS. Data imported from Wiki can already answer a request like Education in the 10th Century. Vegaswikian 17:57, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Briefly and bluntly, what's in it for Wikipedia? Would it be this OASIS, that has gone and apparently annoyed a lot of open-source developers? --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 03:47, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • Red herring. This particular committee of OASIS doesn't operate under a RAND patent policy. There is no direct benefit to Wikipedia, but there is a benefit to a new class of Wikipedia users, namely those who are creating topic maps, and the costs are very small. --John Cowan 13:52, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

Painting titles

What is the proper format for painting titles? Album titles take italics, song titles take quotes. Is there an appropriate format for paintings? RickK 23:17, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

  • I don't know what is "proper", but I would normally italicize. For example, I would certainly write Guérnica or The Last Supper. But then there are some weird cases, like that I would probably write Mona Lisa without italicizing, although if I were to call the same work La Gioconda, I would italicize. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:38, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
  • If there isn't a policy, there ought to be. I concur with Jmabel; titles should be in italic type. Looking around, the Manual of Style main page includes "works of visual art" in its list of things that should appear in italics. The subpage specific to title style, however, specifies quotation marks (no italics) for statues and is wholly mute on what to do with paintings. I'll raise the question on the talk page there; the Manual of Style pages at least ought to agree with one another. Er, never mind. There's already an ongoing discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Paintings.3F. --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 03:37, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Francisco Moreno

This article is copied from http://www.famousamericans.net/franciscomoreno/, which says that it's "Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson, John Fiske and Stanley L. Klos. Six volumes, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889 and 1999. StanKlos.com warns that these 19th Century biographies contain errors and bias. We rely on volunteers to edit the historic biographies on a continual basis. If you would like to edit this biography please submit a rewritten biography in text form . If acceptable, the new biography will be published above the 19th Century Appleton's Cyclopedia Biography citing the volunteer editor.", but at the bottom of the page it says, "Copyright© 2000 by StanKlos.comTM. All rights reserved. ". How can they claim copyright? RickK 00:01, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

  • It's boilerplate. They don't have any enforceable copyright on the article itself, but they do on their (ugly) page layout, on most of what you just quoted (although clearly your use here falls under fair use), etc. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:41, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
    • Well, it's not MY use, I was just checking to see if it's a copyvio. So then, we can pillage their articles wholesale? RickK 22:19, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Doppelganger accounts

The problem of imposter vandals masquerading as legit users has become at the least, quite a nuisance, and at the worst, a serious problem on Wikipedia. Consider the Doppelganger vandal. In recent discussion on this page, Discussion:Preempting Impersonators, the question was rasied: Is it acceptable for users to create "imposter" accounts (which we're calling "Doppelganger accounts" or DG's) of their usernames so that they won't be available for real imposters. The overwhealming consensus was that not only was it okay to create these accounts, but should be encouraged. TenOfAllTradessuggested the development of a template for DG's so they could be easily differentiated from real imposters. I created Template:Doppelganger, and asked for other's commments. 10 suggested that a policy on creating/using DG's was also needed, and he offered a draft, which he, Sjakkalle, and I have reviewed and posted as a proposed policy. We have started the discussion on the policy's talk page, and would appreciate comments from other users. Essjay · talk 03:31, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

(I'm copying this conversation to the policy talk page so that we will have one centralized discussion; can we contine the discussion there?) Essjay · talk

  • Of course all hell would break loose if a doppelganger found the list in question... - Mgm|(talk) 09:01, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)
I'm confused...Why would all hell break loose (the accounts have passwords only known to thier creator, the "real user") and what list do you mean? Essjay · talk 09:28, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)
Somewhat wryly, I concede Mgm's point (at least, my interpretation of it—correct me if I'm mistaken). By checking what links here for the Doppelganger template list, or by looking in the Doppelganger category, a potential vandal can see which users are most concerned about being impersonated. Further, a category provides a convenient list of which Doppelganger names are taken, and which are still available. Hm. Perhaps if users of the Doppelganger template only subst: it, such that what links here won't pull the whole list of accounts...? --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 22:07, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I see now...I wasn't thinking of "what links here" (at this point, I'm not supporting a category). Really, though, I don't think it would be of much use. So what, they know what names are taken: they would have found that out when they tried to register one and couldn't, and they still can't use it. So what, they know what names aren't taken: they would have found that out when they tried to register one and were successful. Also, there wouldn't really be a list of "available" names, because only unavailable names would show up in "what links."
I think we all know that we can never stop impersonators, but we can deter them by making sure the most obvious methods are unavailable. The "daring vandals" are going to find ways to work around us, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use this tool if it makes the Wiki a better, and less impersonated, place. Essjay · talk 22:33, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

If I understand the ESA copyright policy correctly, their images may be used in noncommercial and educational purposes. Doesn't Wikipedia qualify then? I am asking because recently it seems the noncommercial-ESA tag has been changed to suggest that the image is not allowed on Wikipedia and will be deleted. I would like some clarification. Maver1ck 11:43, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In the spirit of making a truly unrestricted encyclopedia, i.e. one whose content could even be used commercially, Jimbo and other members of the Wikimedia board have decided not to allow images that are restricted only non-commercial/educational contexts. In essence, the argument is, why shouldn't <insert big corporation here> have the same rights to use our material as any other person. Hope that helps. I'm sure someone will chime in with a link to the appropriate discussion any time now, but I don't actually have the time to go digging for it. Dragons flight 15:11, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)
Note the Signpost article this week, that Wikipedia representatives will be meeting the ESA shortly. Perhaps we'll have a more liberal arrangement shortly. -- Arwel 15:26, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks to both of you. I checked out NASA's policy and was a bit surprised that they do allow commercial use to an extent. Anyway, I hope the meeting with ESA goes well. I believe it would be in their interest to loosen up the copyright policy a little. They are relatively unknown among the general public as it is, and so everything they can do to help spread the word, so to speak, would be great. Good luck to the Wikipedia representatives! Maver1ck 22:30, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
NASA is part of the United States federal government. All works created by US federal employees as part of their job are public domain. Note that not everything under the nasa.gov domain is actually federal government sites, there's R&D labs run by universities and such where the material is restricted. I know that last bit seems irrelevant, but so many people get it wrong. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:34, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A number of sites provide scads of "etexts" in violation of the Berne Convention, copyright law in the nation where the servers of the linked site are located, and copyright law in the US (where WP's servers are located) — at least according to my understanding of (a) copyright terms as summarized here and (b) the facts of publication.

If we may put aside copyright considerations, these sites are certainly useful. But may we put them aside? Obvious options include:

  • Linking as usual
  • Linking with a warning about copyright
  • Not linking

WP:External links says nothing about this. What do you think? This (pump) page is already too long for comfort and old discussions aren't very easy to access, so if you have an opinion please express it not here but instead in WP T:External links#...sites that violate copyright. Thanks. -- Hoary 02:48, 2005 Jun 16 (UTC)

The admin power and self-restrain

Recently, I have seen some very active admins entered heated disputes on some controversial subjects. Two of them have the habit of renaming articles without asking anyone else. These hit-and-run incidents are not unusual. After I made my complains, some other people also made their own complains. I didn't know it was such a wide-spread pattern of abuse.

Can we ask the admins or arbcom members to stay away from debates? Some debates are just endless. If you become a part of it, people will never trust your neutrality. There're more than enough people who are always debating something. Even if you don't join the game, someone else will almost always say your words. As a Wikipedian entrusted with power, an admin really should keep him/herself from being an advocate to a POV. Admins shall be peacemakers or protectors.

I hope my proposal will one day become a de facto policy. If you want to join the fight, don't apply for adminship. If an admin joins the fight, either quit the fight or give up your adminship. We have more than enough heavy-weight boxers. Do we want to selectively give some of them bazookas? -- Toytoy 16:04, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

The ongoing debate on how/if Arbcom should respond to content disputes is clearly relevant here. Dragons flight 16:13, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
Could you provide some examples? Moving/renaming articles without consensus or during an edit war is unusual and almost always a bad idea. If there are ongoing issues perceived with specific editors, some polite followup may be appropriate. It should be noted, however, that renaming an article doesn't require admin privileges—regular logged-in editors can move articles too.
Certainly admins should avoid using their unique privileges (blocking, page protection, page deletion) to advance their particular point of view in an argument, but I think it would be a bit extreme to insist they forego the use of their tools entirely in order to participate in isolated discussions. Admins are often promoted to that position based on their ability to keep a cool head and moderate disputes, as well as for their familiarity with Wikipedia policy. I dare say that those people are the ones that we most want to participate in debates. --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:20, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Qur'an desecration controversy of 2005 is my example (it's the latest title du jour before we raise the issue to somewhere above). Besides ideological issues, the constant renames had created a great number of double and triple redirects and the involved admins did not bother to clean them up. I cleaned up the redirects for more than 3 times. The last time, I waited for more than 12 hours and left messages on user pages and the article's talk page and they seemed to ignore my request. This is nothing but a technical issue. It's not like asking you to change your belief. If you rename an article, you always clean up these double and triple redirects. Is that too much to ask for? -- Toytoy 16:40, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
It seems a lot to ask of experienced users to not enter controvertial topics. Admins aren't given extra authority, just some extra tools. It isn't a governing hierarchy, it's just a matter of the community giving extra powers to trusted users. If an admin is in a dispute they should never use admin powers - never lock a page if you are involved in the dispute, never block someone for a 3RR violation if you are the one reverting their edits. As for moving pages without consensus - anyone can do it (at least the first time) and no one should do it. All these things fall within existing policy or guidelines - and if admins do not abide by these guidelines, then a request for de-adminship is in order. To expand this and ask that admins avoid debates seems somewhat excessive. This would either mean that admins can only edit non-controvertial pages and it would also mean that, if you wanted to push a POV on a page and were editting against an admin, you would be free to drive them out of the page simply by creating a "debate".
Adminship was not created to govern Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia first and a community second. There are rules in place that admins should abide by. If they don't, then the community should act accordingly. But I don't think creating a new policy that would limit the ability of admins to contribute as editors. I don't see it adding to the purpose of creating a quality encyclopaedia. Guettarda 16:26, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It is possible that I insert "The earth is flat." in the article earth and create a one-man crusade just to drive the admins away. However, even if some admins are driven away, there will always be people who would correct my mistakes or argue with me.
If you want to have a life, don't join Wikipedia. If you want to spend the rest of your life in disputes, don't apply for adminship.
The bottomline is: an admin shall not set a fire. An admin shall always try his/her best to make peace. It will be much more difficult for people to respect you and trust you if you always have more than a dozen heated ongoing debates on your watch list. Currently, I have 22 articles on my watch list. I'd like to drop some of them off the list because I do have a life.
Personally I'd like to see more admins who would make very few edits a day and have a life. -- Toytoy 16:53, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
I see your point about admins getting involved with conflicts and behaving badly. In the ideal world, admins would not get into any disputes and everyone would be fine. However, in reality, admins tend to be the ones most active on Wikipedia, and would thus be involved in a fair bit of conflict. IMO, it's less the number of disputes they get involved with, and more the way they handle disputes (and a very important part of this is if they use the admin tools to handle the disputes, as mentioned above). That's why question #3 on WP:RFA (Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?) is fairly important. Being involved in a conflict and being able to handle it is a mark of experience with Wikipedia, and I think one can trust an admin who does a lot with Wikipedia (including those who "have no lives") a lot more more than an admin who contributes only a couple of edits a week. The former would likely be involved in more than a few conflicts, while te latter would likely not get involved in any conflicts at all (or a very few). --Deathphoenix 17:35, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Complaint

Wikipedia is incredibly naive OR deceitful and fraudulent. The so-called POV issues are always resolved from a Politically Correct atheistic view point. I tested the system and introduced powerful factual arguments which were deleted...Congratulations but no cigar! Another honest Wikipedia needs to be built!

Jean-Francois Orsini, Ph.D. jorsini1@earthlink.net June 16 2005

There's six hundred thousand articles in the database. If you want any kind of meaningful response, you're going to have to be less vague. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:26, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
As a PhD you claim to be you should know that being more specific usually helps, and generalisations do not. You could use an interlink to give us examples of your tests of the system, deletion of your arguments and those alleged "Politically Correct atheistic view point" (and I won't even ask about the research you made to prove that all ~600,000 Wiki articles share the same POV). Besides, if you seriously want to comment on this project, you should register and post in the appopriate section, like Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) - I hardly see what part of your post is a policy-related proposal (except your suggestion that a new Wiki needs to be created :>). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 21:10, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Fixing giant loopholes in Wikipedia:Survey guidelines

Wikipedia:Survey guidelines, a guideline for all manners of surveys and votes on Wikipedia, is deeply flawed in its existing rules and fails to adress several important issues. A prime example is that in Gdansk/Vote it allows both sides of the dispute to claim they are immune from 3RR rule, as well as disputing the very vote results. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 19:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The bulk of this conversation has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Survey guidelines where it belongs. I've left Piotrus's intro text here. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Proposal: Conflict of Interest ethical guideline

I just proposed an ethical guideline for dealing with conflicts of interest. I explained my motivation for this on its associated talk page. Briefly, my main concern is employees who write about the companies they work for. --Yannick 04:54, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Warez groups: do we need a policy?

I am uncertain what to do about List of warez groups and the individual groups listed there, such as Again (warez). Clearly some of these groups are interesting enough to deserve articles, but I am very reluctant to have Wikipedia advertising the existence of active warez groups. Kelly Martin 05:08, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

As far as notability, the same criteria applies with any other group. Razor 1911 is certainly notable, Again is probably not, and that article needs to be deleted. As for villainy, why should we be more concerned about having articles for active warez groups than we are for active terrorist groups? Are you saying we could be helping their nefarious deeds? I doubt it. I'm very confused as to why there's all the hubbub over Again. It's not like they're pirating over Wikipedia. --Golbez 06:04, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
I think the idea was that some individuals who might not otherwise have known about these groups might utilize the list to commit illegal acts. At least, that was my understanding. For the record, I have no opinion on the subject, I'm just clarifying what I understood the comment to state. Is my understanding correct, Kelly? -- Essjay · talk 08:36, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
I just noticed her original objection was to List of warez groups; many of these are notable. Looking at the list, I see SHOCK (notable only because of CiA/The Corporation), CORE, Phrozen Crew, and of course the venerable Razor 1911 - I know these names not because I'm a pirate, but because I ran a BBS ten years ago and I simply saw these names bandied about. However, I would say most of these groups fail a notability test, regardless of their illegality. This list needs pruning. --Golbez 13:51, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
The conflict is the same that arises over whether people should be allowed to distribute instructions for constructing a bomb on the Internet. My personal opinion is that criminals will get their information wherever they have to, and unfettered access will primarily benefit those who use the information legitimately. In any case there's no existing policy or law against this sort of article. Deco 22:44, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Standardizing Table Formats

Not totally sure this is the right forum for this but...

In my additions to Wikipedia it has been my intent to produce tables (particularly chronoligical lists of incumbents) to a certain standard, incorporating such amendments as made by fellow Wikipedians into the standard where they further the format. However, and no derogation is intended against those who in all good faith have updated the tables, there have been amendments i.e. to Bishop of Birmingham and Bishop of Coventry whereby different standards are being applied, to no overall benefit.

I don't want to start appearing to be dictating as to which format is correct or risk causing offence in broaching the subject directly on the Wikipedians' own talk pages, but I would like to elicit general opinion on this, if there is an opinion.

Now I may be wrong, but I feel that the recent updates in the format don't add to or enhance the tables. Indeed, in particular, the use of text formatting (now removed) were specifically employed either as a method of best making use of the page-space, or as part of accepted use (i.e. it is accepted that dignities etc, are placed in smaller font) or for purpose of clarity, employing the use of font-weight to emphasise the commonly used names where the full name is known and should, IMO, be shown

I would say that:-

1991 to 2001 James Lawton Thomson, MA, DLitt, FCA Resigned

and

2001 to present John William Hind, BA Bishop of the Diocese in Europe

are clearer, more informative, and make better use of page-space (especially when larger text can make the left (where full dates are known) and right columns extend over more lines than necessary) than either:-

1991–2001 James Lawton Thomson Resigned

or

2001 to present John William Hind, BA Bishop of the Diocese in Europe

What does everyone else think?? --JohnArmagh 19:03, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't see any point in using small fonts. If the bolding served an important purpose, it should be re-added. What purpose does it serve? - Omegatron 19:27, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)


The bolding is to show the usual names by which the individual is known, as in Robert Alexander Kennedy Runcie and John Hubert Richard Lewis.
The small text saves space when the text is "Dean of Rochester; sequestrated 1640; died in communion with Rome, 1655" as opposed to "Dean of Rochester; sequestrated 1640; died in communion with Rome, 1655". Smaller font means more lines per page and means that annotations don't make the columns wider than necessary or rows higher than necessary. Same with the dates, especially on lower resolution displays: when restricted to a table column 22 December 1922 to 13 September 1936 is more likely to be on the same line (making the detail clearer and neater than 22 December 1922 to 13 September 1936).
It is a generally accepted format in reference works that dignities etc. are indicated in smaller font: Wilfred Marcus Askwith, KCMG, DD
--JohnArmagh 19:52, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The latter presentation with the use of toccolours and use of font adjustments only for footnotes and the like is what you will find used very widely in Wikipedia, so I prefer it over your style. I didn't know that small tags were automatically closed at the end of the cell: you learn something every day. Noisy | Talk 19:41, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

It was a deliberate choice to use a different colour from toccolours - After using white background for a while, after consideration I felt that a background colour should be used, and that the main table of the subject should have a different colour from table of contents and any templates set to toccolors. --JohnArmagh 20:00, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I "fixed" your examples, as they were probably meant to be formatted. Change back if your concern was over the actual markup used. - Omegatron 20:17, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)


Cheers, that pretty much tells it like it is - I think it is the overall effect I am looking at rather than the markups employed. --JohnArmagh 20:23, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So the bold is to indicate that, for instance, James Lawton Thomson is usually just referred to as James Thomson. I think that's certainly pertinent and should be re-added to the names. The rest is just cosmetic, though, right? Not functional? So I would say go by what most people think looks better. I personally like the prettytable formatting better, and don't like small fonts. Also:
"Formatting issues such as font size, blank space and color are issues for the Wikipedia site-wide style sheet and should not be dealt with in articles except in special cases. If you absolutely must specify a font size, use a relative size i.e. "font-size:80%"; not an absolute size i.e. "font-size:4pt"." - Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Formatting_issues - Omegatron 02:16, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)
The only reason small tags are "automatically" closed is that the Wikipedia servers are set up to run their output html through Tidy, which attempts to fix people's awful broken syntax. Relying on this is a mistake, as Tidy has occasionally been disabled for various reasons. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:24, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your input thus far. At the end of the day what I like is irrelevant, it is what is most beneficial to the Wiki and its readers & users which is important - and to this end I would like to incorporate a standard which a) meets Wiki convention and b) enhances the look of the information contained in the table at the outset to avoid people spending unnecessary time changing what I put and putting their energy instead into adding to the compendium. Certainly I will take on the point of the proper closing of tags. I thought that the small tag created a relative font-size, but if "font-size=" is preferable then fair enough. Certainly my use of font-size is intended to be a structured and meaningful one - conserving visual space and not crowding the main information (as in the small text for KCMG, MA, DD, etc.) --JohnArmagh 07:23, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I can't see having a policy on boldfacing as in your examples: it would be too difficult to enforce, and possibly lead to disagreements among editors. There's no point in setting a policy that 99% of current editors don't follow, regardless of whether it's a good idea. I'm fine with allowing small fonts in tables, although I'm uncertain whether instruction creep is necessary in this case. —Wahoofive (talk) 20:36, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

US centric pieces and NPOV

I've been using Wikipedia a lot more than usual recently, because I've been researching things for a gigantic fiction project I'm taking part in and this means I've been accessing a wide variety of articles on Wikipedia and one very significant thing I have noticed is that certain articles seem significantly culture-influenced without something being done about it.

Take for instance the Privateer and Letter of Marque and Reprisal, the latter being an especially good example, since Letters of Marque and Reprisal are a European phenomenon from around the 17th century (a bit earlier and a bit later) and yet somehow more than half of the article consists of a statement about the US Constitution's view on LoM&R and how a dean from a US Law school interprets that. All in all the article offers no information on the LoM&R other than: a dictionary definition and the US Constitution's view on it.

The articles above and certain others I've noticed here (the fact that it would take up too much time and space to search for all of the ones I've noticed) contain information that does not contribute in any significant way to the article (for the US constitution's opinion on something, a person would look at the US Constitution article, not the article for that specific thing) and it seems to have no other purpose than the person 'contributing' waving a flag saying 'hey look, I'm proud to be an American'.

Well I know that the NPOV section tells us to just remove cultural bias, but would it be a good idea to warn contributers that posting things that do not have any significance to the article and that only show a cultural viewpoint unrelated to the subject is not permissable.

Don't think I'm being anti-amerian because of the examples I chose, there are also articles, especially certain military articles, that only mention British or Australian or Dutch or German flagwaving. Robrecht

we know this is a prblem see Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias.Geni 00:41, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We're aware of the issue, but it's a difficult one to solve quickly. Since all of our articles are written by volunteers who add what they know, we're sometimes left with huge gaps where things they don't know are left out. I suspect the Letter of Marque article was begun by someone who encountered the concept in researching that section of the Constitution, discovered we didn't have an article, and began one with what s/he knew, from the Constitutional perspective. Ideally they would have done a little more research and contributed more on LoM worldwide, but we can't force anyone to do so. Over time, we trust this sort of article will be fleshed out by others (like you) with more information and interest in the subject; if you can't improve it yourself, you've at least drawn attention to the article so perhaps you will see some improvement soon. — Catherine\talk 01:06, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The Privateer article includes the U.S. information that you mention, but it also reports: "European powers renounced privateering in the 1856 Declaration of Paris." I think both these passages about the legal status of privateering are relevant to the article. More generally, as an example of Catherine's point, I'm a lawyer admitted to practice in New York. Some of the things I know about law are general, some are specific to the U.S., some are specific to New York, and I don't always know which is which. If I have knowledge that's relevant to an article, certainly I should add it. I'm not familiar with researching the law of other countries. For me to try to produce a comprehensive trans-national survey of a particular legal point would take me weeks of full-time effort. Thus, I usually can't live up to the ideal Catherine mentions. One principle of editing, though, is that you don't have to make the article perfect; you just have to make it better than it was. That's why we rely on the procedure she describes, of having different people flesh out an article. JamesMLane 01:24, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I personally would have to say that I totally agree that a comment on the legal status of a LoM&R is definately relevant. However the comment on whether or not Congress can offer the President a Letter of Marque and Reprisal belongs in (a subsection of) United States Constitution not Letter of Marque and Reprisal Robrecht 01:40, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I disagree. The U.S. Constitution covers a huge number of important topics. To include this kind of detail about each one would make that article far too long. The same would be true of comparable articles about other legal systems. Someone who wanted to know any particular nation's law concerning letters of marque should go to the Letter of marque article. The more important consideration, though, is that most readers won't come to Wikipedia with such a specific question. Someone who opens an encyclopedia article is probably looking for a general overview of the important information about a subject. A survey of the legal status of letters of marque in different countries is a reasonable component of that summary. The problem isn't that there's too much information about U.S. law in this article; it's that there's not enough about the law of other countries. This problem is a reflection of the systemic bias mentioned above. JamesMLane 21:37, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to point you to the United States Constitution article on Wikipedia... it really IS very large. Any way, if you want to know what the US Constitution has to say about a Letter of Marque, you don't look at Wikipedia (or any other encyclopedia). Instead you look at (literature about) the US Constitution. People who look at an encyclopedia want a general summary of important points about the subject they're looking into and with all due respect, the US constitution's opinion of that subject is NOT an important point. At the very most the article should state that the US Constitution has an opinion on the subject and where it can be found in the Constitution. Robrecht 00:02, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sort key

Which is the preferred sort key for an article that is the category? [[Category:Fearsome men|*]] or [[Category:Fearsome men| ]]? I would say the latter (and it did seem that the tide has been turning to that method on wikipedia) but after just being reverted I was wondering if there was any policy on this. Oh, and in case people don't know... "*" will sort it with an asterisk as the header while " " will sort it with no header (which to me means that category itself is the header which is precisely the point... gren 16:03, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I myself prefer " ", but if it's already at "*", there's no point resorting. Also, all pages in the same category should use either " " or "*". AFAIK, there's no policy about it. --cesarb 16:12, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Copy-paste but not {{copyvio}} policy?

I was overzealous and {{copyvio}}'d these two pages: Second Treatise of the Great Seth and The Devil's Walk. The first is some kind of ancient text so is out of copyright. However, it is effectively a personal essy, POV etc etc of whoever originally wrote it and, more importantly to my question, was a straight copy-paste into Wikipedia. The second is a copy-paste of a poem, along with a copyvio bit at the top that I removed. What's the policy for these things? Always leave lone? VfD and see what people think? -Splash 16:34, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)

Hard to say. If it looks like a nonfiction/informational article of any sort, leave it alone (or help wikify it). If it looks more like an editorial or work of fiction, see what the VfDers think about it. Not sure which way to go with ones on the boundary. Deco 22:37, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
If it's a notable ancient text in it should be moved to wikisource... the article here should not just be a copy of the text, it should be commentary about how the text is relevant. gren 00:39, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
IANAL, but I believe you have to consider the age of the translation in a case like this. That may still be copyrighted. Tupsharru 04:56, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Image copyrights

Hi. Jombo Jimbo recently announced a change in the Image use policy [10]. I.e. as I understand it, only images that allow derivatives and commercial use are OK. Is there a central page to discuss this? Most image policy pages are not yet updated. A link to a relevant (talk) page would be appreciated. thanks -- Chris 73 Talk 15:26, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

Presuming you mean Jimbo... I don't think there is a central forum, but Wikipedia talk:Images for deletion might be a good place to drop a note to start. Cheers, smoddy 15:29, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Uh, yes, Jimbo. Thanks for the link -- Chris 73 Talk 15:30, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
How does this affect fair use images? Steve block 16:01, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There will be more of them. smoddy 16:14, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
? I mean images that are placed on wiki under fair use laws, such as book covers. Does this removal of non-commercial and permission only not affect them in any way? And if it doesn't, why does it afect non commercial and permission only images? Steve block 16:21, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Basically, the mailing list message outlawed with-permission images. Due to WP's mirrors, sites that mirror these images are breaking copyright, because the images are only allowed to be used on Wikipedia. Fair use allows them to be used, if there is a valid fair-use claim to be made. In short, a lot of with-permission images will have to go, but some can be re-tagged as fair-use. smoddy 16:25, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Aha, thanks. Steve block 17:38, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hmmm. It is a bit ironic that this will apparently affect images like Image:Tampa meetup Jimbo2.jpg, featuring Jimbo himself :> --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 16:41, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Does anyone have any thoughts about the maximum number of External links that an article should have? I just had a peek as Ethiopia, & was a bit surprised to find about 35 external links at the bottom of the page! Seeing this many links at the bottom, I can't help but think that there's something wrong with the article -- e.g., it's not complete enough, it's very controversial (& needs the proper warning added), or someone needs to audit all of these links & prune the less useful ones.

So can someone justify having more than a dozen external links at the bottom of any article? Two dozen? 35? Wikipedia:External links does not address this issue. -- llywrch 18:54, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is mention of this at Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not. Quote:
Wikipedia articles are not [...] Mere collections of external links or Internet directories. There is nothing wrong with adding to an article a list of content-relevant links; however, excessive lists can dwarf articles and detract from the purpose of Wikipedia.
I personally have high standards for external links, believing that they should be authoritative, well-established, comprehensive, and (ideally) present unique information or perspective that the other external links do not. If there are many such links, I think it's alright to have a long list, but if the list of links dwarfs the article, then someone needs to visit those links and use them to add information to the article. Deco 19:03, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'd say that it's usually a judgement call. Blindly applying some sort of hard-and-fast number will lead to two problems:
  1. People will fight over which links should be kept to keep an article inside its link quota,
  2. People will insist that any ridiculous link be allowed to remain, since the article hasn't filled its link quota.
I get concerned when an article is dwarfed by its list of links, or when there's more than half a screen or so. On the other hand, if they're all useful, non-repetitive, non-advertising, reasonable links, then they can stay. I'm sure that every editor will have preferred criteria for link retention. --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 19:10, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Voting Templates

Several users have imported the voting templates {{Support}} and {{Oppose}} from Commons (e.g. Commons:Featured picture candidates) and have begun using them on Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates and other places. These templates have been nominated for deletion, however, I do not believe that TFD is an appropriate venue for discussing this issue since it centers on the user behavior and whether the potentially pervasive insertion of little tags such as:

  • Support
  • Oppose
  • Object

poses a significant threat to server resources and/or is too obnoxious to tolerate.

I would encourage a general discussion of this behavior to occur here, and ask that voting on the TFD be suspended pending a consensus on the more general issue of whether users should be allowed to use templates / images when voting. Dragons flight 22:57, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

(The templates are {{support}}, {{oppose}} and {{object}} and have been "subst:"ed above - for them in use, see WP:FPC and WP:FAC.)
Some very cogent reasons for deletion are already listed on WP:TFD - why we shouldn't have the debate there? (But thank you for publicising the vote in a wider arena ;) Given that I nominated them for deletion, I'd rather not see them spread further than that have already before they are deleted. -- ALoan (Talk) 23:06, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A very important point that nobody seems to have raised at TfD: These templates can be edited to turn votes into opposite votes, or nonsense. If we do keep these, it's imperative that they be protected as soon as they pass TfD. But I think they should be deleted for all the reasons on TfD. Nickptar 23:46, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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